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The Weird and the Wild: Media Ecologies of the Outré-Normative

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Spaces and Fictions of the Weird and the Fantastic

Part of the book series: Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies ((GSLS))

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Abstract

Julius Greve traces the conceptual affinities of “the weird” and “the wild” in American literature and culture from transcendentalism to the present. Focusing on the ethics and aesthetics of both concepts Greve discusses multiple theorists, authors, and artists including H. P. Lovecraft, Henry David Thoreau, Jack London, Gary Snyder, Tzvetan Todorov, Thomas Ligotti, Werner Herzog, John Carpenter, Wu Tsang, and Jack Halberstam. Drawing on Lovecraft’s, Snyder’s and Halberstam’s theoretical vocabularies, Greve offers a theory of the “outré-normative” as a highly productive conception according to which one might synthesize the discourses of weirdness and wildness.

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Greve, J. (2019). The Weird and the Wild: Media Ecologies of the Outré-Normative. In: Greve, J., Zappe, F. (eds) Spaces and Fictions of the Weird and the Fantastic. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28116-8_4

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