Preternature V5:2: Preternatural Environments

by Debbie Felton, Hannah Kagan-Moore, Juanita Feros Ruys

This issue, devoted to the specific topic of “Preternatural Environments,” focuses on the preternatural aspects of both natural and unnatural environments, with four essays investigating the connections among preternatural landscape elements and artistic, historical, literary, psychological, and religious points of view. The first article, Hannah Kagan-Moore’s “The Journey through the Judgment : Affective Viewing and the Monstrous in Bosch’s Vienna Last Judgment Triptych,” provides a new reading of how monsters operate in the painting’s landscape, arguing that the visual construction of Bosch’s painting compels the viewer to reconsider the nature of sin, salvation, humanity, and monstrosity. The otherworldly landscapes of Australia, troubled by tensions between the continent’s Aborigines and European settlers, provide the basis for both the second and third articles. In “The Devil’s Coach House and Skeleton Cave,” Juanita Feros Ruys examines the history of the Jenolan Caves in New South Wales, explaining how the repressed history of massacres of Indigenous people in the area relates to eerie rumors and perceptions of the caves over time. Kathrin Bartha’s article “The Specter of The Postcolonial Gothic and Preternatural in Alexis Wright’s Plains of Promise ” analyzes the use of preternatural landscapes and human relationships with them in Aboriginal author Wright’s 1997 novel, suggesting that “uncanny nature” can both empower the dispossessed and provide a “space for the unknown” that allows us to reinterpret “the freedom to maintain difference” as a kind of resistance to colonialism. In the final article, “Grotesque The Monstrous in Online Worlds,” authors Robert M. Geraci, Nat Recine, and Samantha Fox examine the preternatural in the virtual environments constructed for the online video games Memento Mori and DayZ . Engagement with landscapes of the monstrous and grotesque allows players to face their inner fears and anxieties, doing so with “the viscerality that is the hallmark of gaming”; this is especially true, the authors argue, when in virtual landscapes “it is the other players who evoke the most dread.”

169 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 1, 2016