Introduction: Ecologies and Geographies of the Weird and the Fantastic

Abstract

In the introduction, Julius Greve and Florian Zappe argue for an innovative reading of the aesthetic and poetological categories of “the weird” and “the fantastic” through the lens of contemporary developments in the environmental humanities, spatial studies and of what Bertrand Westphal has defined as “geocriticism.” Making a case for approaching weird and fantastic genre narratives in terms of Westphal’s tripartite model of geocritical practice as emphasizing spatiotemporality, transgressivity, and referentiality, this chapter also examines the intersections of this type of approach with that of the environmental humanities, broadly speaking, as well as critical theory’s long-lasting preoccupation with the problematics of mapmaking. With modernization and industrialization being the backdrops against which the early “classic” instances of these genre fictions were forged, in the late twentieth and the beginning twenty-first centuries, weird and fantastic narratives across diverse media practices are replete with reflections on environmental crises on both a local and a global scale.