Description: "A history and examination of dystopia and angst in popular culture that speaks to our current climate of dread"--
Brief description: Robert T. Tally Jr. is Professor of English at Texas State University. He is the author of many books, including The Critical Situation: Vexed Perspectives in Postmodern Literary Studies (2023); For a Ruthless Critique of All That Exists (2022); J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit: Realizing History Through Fantasy (2022); Topophrenia: Place, Narrative, and the Spatial Imagination (2019); Fredric Jameson: The Project of Dialectic Criticism (2014); Poe and the Subversion of American Literature (2014); Spatiality (2013); Utopia in the Age of Globalization (2013); Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel (2011); and Melville, Mapping, and Globalization (2009). The translator of Bertrand Westphal's Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces (2011), Tally is also the editor or co-editor of Affective Geographies and Narratives of Chinese Diaspora (2022); Spatial Literary Studies in China (2022); Spatial Literary Studies (2020); Teaching Space, Place, and Literature (2018); The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space (2017); Ecocriticism and Geocriticism (2016); The Geocritical Legacies of Edward W. Said (2015); Literary Cartographies (2014); Kurt Vonnegut: Critical Insights (2013); and Geocritical Explorations (2011). Tally is the general editor of "Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies," a Palgrave Macmillan book series.
Review Quotes:
"What better guide could there be than the ever-incisive Tally to this brave new world of gods, monsters, dystopias, apocalypses, tattered maps, gold-bearing rubble, and, well, monsters? Welcome to the Teratocene!" --Mark Bould, Professor of Film and Literature, UWE Bristol, UK, and author of The Anthropocene Unconscious: Climate Catastrophe Culture (2021)
"From Neil Gaiman and NAFTA to panoptic surveillance in Black Mirror, and from monsters in children's literature to the post-apocalyptic landscapes of modern cinema, Robert T. Tally Jr. in The Fiction of Dread diagnoses the morbid symptoms of contemporary narrative preoccupations. Through attention to dystopian themes, multiplying monsters, and the end of the world, Tally presents a wide-ranging, clearly written, and extremely insightful analysis of the appeal of dreadful things and the kind of critical work they do in helping us attempt to grasp the complexities of our world and imagine other, better possibilities." --Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, Professor of English, Central Michigan University, USA