The Enduring Fantastic: Essays on Imagination and Western Culture

✍ Scribed by Anna Höglund; Cecilia Trenter

• Publisher: McFarland
• Year: 2021
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 233
• Category: Library

✦ 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.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction
The Use of the Fantastic in a Historical Perspective
Dragons and Kingdoms
Egyptian Mummies, Medicine and the Supernatural in Eighteenth-Century Sweden
A Double-Edged Sword
The Use of the Fantastic and Fantastika in Contemporary Culture
A Friend and Foe
Priestesses of Avalon
Dwarfs Are Not Religious, Sir!
Bringing Dragons Back into the World
Our World Is Dew
The Use of the Fantastic and Fantastika in Memory Culture
“And this is how I tried to fathom the Lindenborg Pool”
Fairy Tales Transformed
Remediation of Cultural Memory in the Dragon Age Videogame Series
Fallout, Memory and Values
About the Contributors
Index