The Ecological Imaginary in Literature and Other Media

The Nature of Fantasy
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-032-73321-0
Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Buch, Englisch, 256 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 453 g

Reihe: Routledge Studies in Speculative Fiction

From Gilgamesh to Gawain and the Green Knight, the Brothers Grimm to Grimdark, the natural world has provided the backdrop for Fantasy since its earliest iterations. The playgrounds of childhood are often a writer’s first Fantasy landscape and can develop into fully-fledged storyworlds. Do readers of Fantasy seek out the genre for a taste of this unsullied environment? Is it nostalgia for the lost Edens of childhood; a way to escape; or to find resilience and inspiration? And in a time of Climate Emergency is the nature of Fantasy changing to reflect the challenges it presents? Can the blue-sky thinking of the Fantastic provide us with a useful tool for addressing what the United Nations has called ‘the defining crisis of our time’? This is a timely survey of the environmental aspects of Fantasy, with a unique focus on Fantasy sites and the real-world impact of Fantasy texts across media.

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate

Autoren/Hrsg.

Manwaring, Kevan

Fachgebiete

• Geowissenschaften Umweltwissenschaften Umweltwissenschaften
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Stoffe, Motive und Themen
• Naturwissenschaften Biowissenschaften Biowissenschaften Biowissenschaften, Biologie: Sachbuch, Naturführer
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Gattungen

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction – Fantastical Meditations

1. Early Fantasy – Green Knights and Faerie Queens

2. Children’s Fantasy – The Mythopoeic Land-scapes of Childhood

3. Epic Fantasy – Portals, Paradises, and Waste-lands

4. Urban Fantasy – Edgelands, Polders, and Wain-scots

5. 21st Century Fantasy – Fantastic Ecologies in the Capitalocene

6. Mapping the Fantastic: the ethics of placiality, ar-chitectonics, and speculative cartography

7. Fantasy Sites – Fantasy texts and their real-world impact

Conclusion – The Le Guin Index and Other Interventions

Bibliography

Über Autor(innen)

Kevan Manwaring, Editor of the British Fantasy Society Journal, is the MA Creative Writing programme leader at Arts University Bournemouth. He is the author of Writing Ecofiction, Desiring Dragons, The Windsmith Elegy, Ballad Tales, and editor of Heavy Weather. A contributor to Free Thinking on BBC Radio 3 (panels on Vikings, Ursula K. Le Guin, and John Cowper Powys), he was the Academic Consultant for BBC 4’s The Secret Life of Books. He is a member of the Climate Fiction Writers League.