The Ecological Imaginary in Literature and Other Media: The Nature of Fantasy

From Gilgamesh to Gawain and the Green Knight, the Brothers Grimm to Grimdark, the natural world has provided the backdrop for Fantasy since its earliest iterations. The playgrounds of childhood are often a writer’s first Fantasy landscape and can develop into fully fledged storyworlds. Do readers of Fantasy seek out the genre for a taste of this unsullied environment? Is it nostalgia for the lost Edens of childhood, a way to escape, or to find resilience and inspiration? And in a time of Climate Emergency, is the nature of Fantasy changing to reflect the challenges it presents? Can the blue-sky thinking of the Fantastic provide us with a useful tool for addressing what the United Nations has called ‘the defining crisis of our time’? This is a timely survey of the environmental aspects of Fantasy, with a unique focus on Fantasy sites and the real-world impact of Fantasy texts across media.