Fiction of Dread

Robert T. Tally Jr. is Professor of English at Texas State University. His recent books include 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); Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel (2011); and Melville, Mapping, and Globalization (2009). Tally is also the editor of the Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies book series.

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction: Monstrous Accumulation1. Evoking Dread: The Reality of Possibility2. Baleful Continuities; or, the Desire Called Dystopia3. Lost in Grand Central: American Gods, Free Trade, and Globalization4. The Utopia of the Mirror: The Postmodern Mise en abyme5. Welcome to the Teratocene: Morbid Symptoms at the Present Conjuncture6. Teratology as Ideology Critique; or, a Monster Under Every Bed7. The End-of-the-World as World System8. In the Deserts of the Empire: The Map, the Territory, and the Heterotopian EnclaveConclusion: Gold-Bearing RubbleBibliographyIndex

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!