DownloadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2024

The Enduring Fantastic

Essays on Imagination and Western Culture

Anna Hoglund editor Cecilia Trenter editor

Format:Paperback

Publisher:McFarland & Co Inc

Published:11th Jun '21

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

The Enduring Fantastic cover

Fantastic fiction is traditionally understood as Western genre literature such as fantasy, science fiction, and horror. Expanding on this understanding, these essays explore how the fantastic has been used in Western societies since the Middle Ages as a tool for organizing and materializing abstractions in order to make sense of the present social order. Disciplines represented here include literature studies, gender studies, biology, ethnology, archeology, history, religion, game studies, cultural sociology, and film studies. Individual essays cover topics such as the fantastic creatures of medieval chronicle, mummy medicine in eighteenth-century Sweden, how fears of disease filtered through the universal and adaptable vampire, the gender aspects of goddess worship in the secular West, ecocentrism in fantasy fiction, how videogames are dealing with the remediation of heritage, and more.

“Offers numerous insightful, informative and original contributions to a wide variety of topics circulating around the fantastic’s multiple interconnections with cultural histories….The book will be a valuable resource for scholars/students of the fantastic...”—Sean Moreland, University of Ottawa

ISBN: 9781476680125

Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 12mm

Weight: 299g

232 pages