The Enduring Fantastic

Essays on Imagination and Western Culture

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Edited by Anna Höglund and Cecilia Trenter

Type

Studies

Subject

Genre > Fantasy

Keywords

fantasy, sociology

Publishing date

2021

Publisher

McFarland & Co

Language

English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Paperback • 232 pages
6 x 9 inches (15 x 23 cm)

ISBN

978-1-4766-8012-5

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Book Presentation:
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.

About the authors:
Anna Hoglund is a senior lecturer in comparative literature at Linnaeus University, Sweden. Her research areas are horror fiction and fantastic fiction in literature and film with a focal point on the functions of monsters like vampires, zombies and werewolves, as instrumental interpretations of the world.
Cecilia Trenter is a senior lecturer in history at Malmo University, Sweden. She works within the research field of memory studies and public history, including heritage adaptions and remediation in fiction, for instance epic films and computer-games.

Press Reviews:
"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

See the publisher website: McFarland & Co