Fantastic Modernity

Focusing on the convergence of Romantic studies and literary theory over the past twenty-five years, Orrin N. C. Wang pairs a series of contemporary critics with "originary" Romantic writers in order to illuminate the work of both the contemporary theorist and earlier Romantic. Wang examines Paul de Man's deconstructive use of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Jerome McGann's Marxist-inflected appropriation of Heinrich Heine, contemporary feminist interpretations of Mary Wollstonecraft, and Harold Bloom's pragmatic reading of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Through these examinations, along with commentary on Keats, Jameson, Lovejoy, and Spitzer, Fantastic Modernity attempts a series of new readings of both the theory being used by the various critics and the primary Romantic texts under consideration.

Modern Japan's repressed anxieties, fears and hopes come to the surface in the fantastic. A close analysis of fantasy fiction, film and comics reveals the ambivalence felt by many Japanese towards the success story of the nation in the twentieth century. The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature explores the dark side to Japanese literature and Japanese society. It takes in the nightmarish future depicted in the animated film masterpiece, Akira, and the pastoral dream worlds created by Japan's Nobel Prize winning author Oe Kenzaburo. A wide range of fantasists, many discussed here in English for the first time, form the basis for a ground-breaking analysis of utopias, dystopias, the disturbing relationship between women, sexuality and modernity, and the role of the alien in the fantastic.

This book explores the sense in which the uncanny may be a distinctively modern experience, the way these unnerving feelings and unsettling encounters disturb the rational presumptions of the modern world view and the security of modern self-identity, just as the latter may themselves be implicated in the production of these experiences as uncanny.

This book explores how modernity, the urban, and the sacred overlap in fundamental ways in contemporary Spain. Urban spaces have traditionally been seen as the original sites of modernity, history, progress, and a Weberian systematic disenchantment of the world, while the sacred has been linked to the natural, the rural, mythical past origins, and exemption from historical change. This collection problematizes such clear-cut distinctions as overlaps between the modern urban and the sacred in Spanish culture are explored throughout the volume. Placed in the periphery of Europe, Spain has had a complex relationship with the concept of modernity and commonly understood processes of modernization and secularization, thus offering a unique case-study of the interaction between the modern and the sacred in the city.

This exciting volume in the Transitions series explores both history and contemporary ideas, pushing forward the boundaries of what we understand by 'modernity'. This book is distinguished from its competitors by its clear focus on close readings of commonly-studied texts and a strict policy on writing for an undergraduate readership.

The ten essays in this volume deal with the debates and conflicts about modernity in a period of American history when the tensions and strains caused by seemingly unrestrained change and the reactions to it were particularly severe and tangible. Partly concentrating on the margins or dark underworlds of modernity, such as racism and violence, partly focusing on the allegedly unlimited space to negotiate and create social order from scratch, the contributions to this volume show that, and discuss why, modernity was an issue in contemporary United States which seemed to have been even more hotly contested than in Europe at the same time, albeit sometimes in terms of “Americanism” rather than “modernism”. In this book, European scholars of the United States apply variations on the transnational discourse on modernity to unexpected dimensions of U.S. history, making this volume a fascinating example of the present-day enterprise of internationalizing American studies.

Dread Trident examines the rise of imaginary worlds in tabletop role-playing games (TRPGs), such as Dungeons and Dragons. With the combination of analog and digital mechanisms, from traditional books to the internet, new ways of engaging the fantastic have become increasingly realized in recent years, and this book seeks an understanding of this phenomenon within the discourses of trans- and posthumanism, as well as within a gameist mode. The book explores a number of case studies of foundational TRPGs. Dungeons and Dragons provides an illustration of pulp-driven fantasy, particularly in the way it harmonizes its many campaign settings into a functional multiverse. It also acts as a supreme example of depth within its archive of official and unofficial published material, stretching back four decades. Warhammer 40k and the Worlds of Darkness present an interesting dialogue between Gothic and science-fantasy elements. The Mythos of HP Lovecraft also features prominently in the book as an example of a realized world that spans the literary and gameist modes. Realized fantasy worlds are becoming ever more popular as a way of experiencing a touch of the magical within modern life. Reworking Northrop Frye's definition of irony, Dread Trident theorizes an ironic understanding of this process and in particular of its embodied forms.

Romantic Sobriety explores the relationship among Romanticism, deconstruction, and Marxism by examining tropes of sensation and sobriety in a set of exemplary texts from Romantic literature and contemporary literary theory. Orrin N. C. Wang explains how themes of sensation and sobriety, along with Marxist-related ideas of revolution and commodification, set the terms of narrative surrounding the history of Romanticism as a movement. The book is both polemical and critical, engaging in debates with modern thinkers such as Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Walter Benn Michaels, and Slavoj Žižek, as well as presenting fresh readings of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers, including Wordsworth, Kant, Shelley, Byron, Bront , and Keats. Romantic Sobriety combines deeply complex, close readings with a broader reflection on Romanticism and its implications on literary study. It will interest scholars who study Romanticism from a number of perspectives, including those interested in bodily and social consumption, the roles of addiction and abstinence in literature, the connection between literary and visual culture, the intersection of critical theory and Romanticism, and the relationships among language, historical knowledge, and political practice.