This lecture proposes the idea of a ‘new fantastic’ in the context of contemporary literary and cultural studies. How might we understand the recent emergence of ‘creative non-fiction’, other than as a handy catch-all term for publishers and library cataloguing? What is going on with the striking proliferation of books that are described as ‘one of a kind’, and don’t conform to the conventional categories of novel, autobiography, memoir or academic monograph? At the same time, how might a critical thinking of the ‘fantastic’ provide a new approach to a world of so-called ‘post-truth’, ‘alternative facts’, deep fakes and misinformation? The lecture begins with Tzvetan Todorov’s classic study The Fantastic (1970), noting that Todorov himself concludes with the evocation of a ‘new fantastic’ in relation to Kafka. Drawing on more recent theoretical accounts of the uncanny (Royle 2003, Masschelein 2011, Ravetto-Biagoli 2019) and the weird and eerie (Macfarlane 2015, Fisher 2016), the lecture seeks to give force and shape to a ‘new fantastic’ for the twenty-first century. Exploration of recent novels such as Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad, Natasha Brown’s Assembly and M. John Harrison’s The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, as well as works of creative non-fiction, enables a fresh appreciation of why ‘the fantastic’ matters today, both in the field of literary studies and the humanities and in the social and political realms more generally.

Nicholas Royle is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Sussex, UK, where he established the MA and PhD program in creative and critical writing in 2001. He has also taught at the Universities of Oxford, Tampere (Finland), and Stirling; and has been a visiting professor at the universities of Århus (Denmark), Santiago del Compostela (Spain), Turku (Finland), Manitoba (Canada), and Lille (France). His publications include Telepathy and Literature (1990), The Uncanny (2003), Veering: A Theory of Literature (2011), and David Bowie, Enid Blyton and the Sun Machine (2023), as well as studies of the work of Elizabeth Bowen, E.M. Forster, Jacques Derrida, William Shakespeare and Hélène Cixous. Royle is the author of two novels, Quilt (2010) and An English Guide to Birdwatching (2017), and Mother: A Memoir (2020). In addition, he is co-author with Andrew Bennett of An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory (Sixth edition, 2023) and This Thing Called Literature (Second edition, 2024). He is joint-managing editor of the Oxford Literary Review.