Surreal Entanglements: Essays on Jeff VanderMeer’s Fiction (Routledge Studies in World Literatures and the Environment) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 103200374X ISBN 13: 9781032003740

Publisher: Routledge, 2023

Synopsis

This edited collection approaches the most pressing discourses of the Anthropocene and posthumanist culture through the surreal, yet instructive lens of Jeff VanderMeer’s fiction. In contrast to universalist and essentializing ways of responding to new material realities, VanderMeer’s work invites us to re-imagine human subjectivity and other collectivities in the light of historically unique entanglements we face today: the ecological, technological, aesthetic, epistemological, and political challenges of life in the Anthropocene era. Situating these messy, multi-scalar, material complexities of life in close relation to their ecological, material, and colonialist histories, his fiction renders them at once troublingly familiar and strangely generative of other potentialities and insight. The collection measures VanderMeer’s work as a new kind of speculative surrealism, his texts capturing the strangeness of navigating a world in which "nature" has become radically uncanny due to global climate change and powerful bio-technologies. The first collection to survey academic engagements with VanderMeer, this book brings together scholars in the fields of environmental literature, science fiction, genre studies, American literary history, philosophy of technology, and digital cultures to reflect on the environmentally, culturally, aesthetically, and politically central questions his fiction poses to predominant understandings of the Anthropocene.

About this title

About the Author

Louise Economides is a professor of English and director of the Literature and the Environment program at the University of Montana, Missoula.

Laura Shackelford is Associate Professor of English and founding Director of the Center for Engaged Storycraft at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 103200374X
• ISBN 13: 9781032003740
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 280
• Editor: Economides Louise, Shackelford Laura