Space(s) of the Fantastic

A 21st Century Manifesto

David Punter, C. Bruna Mancini, David Punter, C. Bruna Mancini

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367680282
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000299724
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

This book provides a series of new addresses to the enduring problem of how to categorize the Fantastic. The approach taken is through the lens of spatiality; the Fantastic gives us new worlds, although of course these are refractions of worlds already in being. In place of 'real' spaces (whatever they might be), the Fantastic gives us imaginary spaces, although within those spaces historical and cultural conflicts are played out, albeit in forms that stretch our understanding of everyday location, and our usual interpretations of cause and effect. Many authors are addressed here, from a variety of different geographical and national traditions, thus demonstrating how the Fantastic - as a mode, a genre, a way of thinking, imagining and writing - continually traverses borders and boundaries. We hope to move the ongoing debate about the Fantastic forward in a scholarly as well as an engaging way.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: Space and Fantastic
• 1 Magissatopia: The Place of the Witch
• 2 Spaces of the Fantastic, the Fantastic of Spaces: (Psycho) Wandering the Urban Texture of London
• 3 The Literary Motif of the Devil Architect: Where Built Space Meets the Fantastic
• 4 Time and Space in Fantastic Theory and Fiction of Charles Nodier’s Trilby
• 5 Border Imagery in Victorian ‘Supernatural’ Short Stories: The Portrait
• 6 Rambles in the Fantastic: Digital Mapping Mary Shelley’s Last Man
• 7 Home Is Where the Dark Is: A Literary Geography of Daphne du Maurier’s Disturbing Genres
• 8 Place and Space in the Literary Utopia
• 9 Seeing Things: Competing Worlds in Octavia Butler’s Kindred and China Miéville’s The City and the City
• 10 Of Borders and (W)holes: Porous Geographies of the Fantastic in China Miéville and Nora K. Jemisin
• List of Contributors
• Index