London in the Literature of the Fantastic

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

From the folk tales of Queen Boadicea, to the myths surrounding the giants Gog and Magog that loom in Guildhall, to the Arthurian legends of King Arthur's latter-day courts in London, to the Cock-lane ghost embroiled in spiteful litigations, to Cybermen on the steps of St Paul's Cathedral, to the Hogwarts Express on Platform Nine and Three Quarters at King's Cross Station, London has inspired the fantastical imagination from its earliest pre-Roman days to its contemporary incarnation as a global, cosmopolitan metropolis. In the nineteenth century, London emerged from background setting into a full-fledged character in the literature of the fantastic. Nineteenth-century fantasy transformed London from the teeming heart of the British Empire into the epicentre of ghostly hauntings, apocalyptic plagues, Martian invasions, and insidious vampire infections. In the aftermath of the Second World War and the Blitz, twentieth-century fantasy recast London into new moulds - a dilapidated dystopia, a centre of cosy catastrophe, a rubble-strewn site traversed by stray souls, and a fragmented urban labyrinth where reality and memory blend into a surrealistic carnival. Several decades later, the New Wave harnessed London fantasies to its ongoing project of reclaiming a place for the fantastic as a high-brow experimental literature. The turn of the twenty-first century has seen an unprecedented surge in new London-based fantasies, not just in traditional literary form, but as graphic novels, films, television serials, and even computer games. This course examines the intersection between the fantasy genre (widely considered) and the city of London as both a concrete, historically overdetermined location and a fluctuating imaginary space. Classes will focus on close readings of the set texts, with an emphasis on the study of literature in its historical and cultural context."