The Enduring Fantastic - by Anna Höglund & Cecilia Trenter (Paperback)

About the Book

"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"--

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"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

About the Author

Anna Höglund 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 Malmö 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.