The Dark Matter of Children’s 'Fantastika' Literature

Speculative Entanglements

Chloe Germaine, Lisa Sainsbury

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN:
  9781350167018
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350167032
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: African Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

Following the material turn in the humanities, this book brings perspectives from science and ecology into dialogue with children's fiction written and published in the UK and the USA in the 21st century. It develops the concept of entanglement, which originated in 20th-century quantum physics but has been applied to cultural critique, through a reading of Fantastika literature. Surveying a wide-ranging scope of literary texts, this book covers the gothic, fantasy, the Weird, and other forms of speculative fiction to argue that Fantastika positions entanglement as an ethical imperative that transforms our imaginative relationship with materiality. In so doing, it synthesizes perspectives from a similarly diverse range of areas, including ecology, physics, anthropology, and literary studies, to examine the storied matter of children's Fantastika as ground from which we might begin to imagine an as-yet-unrealised future that addresses the problems of our present.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The ontoethics of entanglement in Fantastika fiction
• 1 Occult materialism: The landscapes of classic fantasy
• 2 Animate worlds: Magical encounters in contemporary fantasy
• 3 Minds, machines, and ghosts: Consciousness in science fiction stories
• 4 Precarious interdependence: The oceans of the ecoweird
• 5 Speak for the trees?: The material politics of climate futures
• 6 Postscript: Thoughts on the reading experiment
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Copyright