Exploring the Fantastic: Genre, Ideology, and Popular Culture (Lettre)

The fantastic represents a wide and heterogeneous field in literary, cultural, and media studies. Encompassing some of the field's foremost voices such as Fred Botting and Larissa Lai, as well as exciting new perspectives by junior scholars, this volume offers a mosaic of the fantastic now. The contributions pinpoint and discuss current developments in theory and practice by offering enlightening snapshots of the contemporary Anglophone landscape of research in the fantastic. The authors' arguments and analyses thus give new impetus to the field's theoretical and methodological approaches, its textual materials, its main interests, and its crucial findings. Contents Introduction GENRE Belief, Potentiality, and the Supernatural: Mapping the Fantastic Fantasy without Fantasy: Politics, Genre, and Media in the Fiction of M. John Harrison Is the Fantastic Really Fantastic? Insurgent Utopias: How to Recognize the Knock at the Door IDEOLOGY Crossing Impossible Boundaries? Fantastic Narrative and Ideology Questioning Mononormativity: A Future of Fantastic Scholarship in Liminal Identities Organic Fantasy and the Alien Archetype in Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon Latino/a Magical Realism and American Superhero Fiction as Constitutive Agents in the Negotiation of Dominican-American Identity in Junot Díaz’ The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao POPULAR CULTURE Flights of Fancy, Secondary Worlds and Blank Slates: Relations between the Fantastic and the Real Creepypastas: How Counterterrorist Fantasies (Re-)Create Horror Traditions for Today’s Digital Communities “All the Better to Eat You With”: The Eroticization of the Werewolf and the Rise of Monster Porn in the Digital Age About the Authors "The fantastic represents a wide and heterogeneous field in literary, cultural, and media studies. Encompassing some of the field's foremost voices such as Fred Botting and Larissa Lai, as well as exciting new perspectives by junior scholars, this volumes offers a mosaic of the fantastic now. The contributions pinpoint and discuss current developments in theory and practice by offering enlightening snapshots of the contemporary Anglophone landscape of research in the fantastic. The authors' arguments and analyses thus give new impetus to the field's theoretical and methodological approaches, its textual materials, its main interests, and its crucial findings."--Back cover