Cities and Fantasy: Urban Imaginary Across Cultures, 1830–1930
The long nineteenth century witnessed the rapid expansion and modernization of cities aroundthe globe. It is often also heralded, by critics working with Anglo-American literature, at least, as
the starting point for studies of the fantastic. Nonetheless, despite the claims of critics such as
Rosemary Jackson and Stephen Prickett that modern fantasy is, in part, a reaction toindustrialization,1 few projects have explored nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century fantasies’engagement with the urban, and fewer still have attempted to address the intertwinement offantasy and the city across cultures, a gap this volume seeks to fill.
Studies in literary works that engage with the city during the period tend to focus on how writers
represented, captured, negotiated, or, at times, contested the changes brought about by various
modernisation and industrialisation projects that were often related to imperial and colonialexpansion or trade and economic initiatives. The emphasis has often been on the realistic, theeveryday, and the busy metropolitan space. Critics have explored how cities have become realand-imagined places in literary works that have been conferred with symbolic and structuralvalues (see, for example, Robert Alter’s Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Languageof the Novel). Works such as Jamieson Ridenhour’s Darkest London: The Gothic Cityscape inVictorian Literature contribute to a growing body of work that focuses on the urban gothic, bothas a sub-genre and a narrative mode in literature dating from the nineteenth century to thecontemporary time. The urban gothic is an important piece of any project on fantasy and urban
spaces, including this one. We also hope, however, to include contributions addressing how
other forms of fantasy or work in the fantastic mode has been used to engage with the city.
Even marvelous nineteenth-century idyllic fantasies usually engage with the unescapable city insome way, or even substantially. We especially seek contributions that explore fantasy and thecity in different cultural contexts, or that explore the relationship between the city and fantasy
across cultures, such as how fantastic literature can put cities in conversations—in
metaphorical, physical or symbolic terms.
Instead of focusing on one single national context, this edited volume invites contributions fromscholars who work with texts that are situated in different cultural contexts and historic moments
between 1830 to 1930. The volume seeks to raise new questions surrounding the relationshipbetween the city and fantasy in a period that witnessed an enhanced global connectedness due
to wars, advancement in technologies of transportation and communication, and other socioeconomic initiatives. The proposed period covers key historic and cultural events that had both
local and global significance. These include the Chartist campaign and the women’s suffrage
movement in Britain, the Sino-British Opium Wars, the Meiji Restoration in Japan, the scramblefor Africa and wars of resistance, the May Fourth Movement in China, the early Republican
periods in many Latin America states,2 the First World War, and the transformation of Hong
Kong into a crown colony, and an entrepôt. The period also covers the rise of new academic
disciplines in Europe and America, including anthropology and folklore, which led to anincreased interest in fantastic and marvelous tales from other cultures. Moreover, risingnumbers of translations of this literature, as well as increased reading of works in their originallanguages (a foreign language for the reader), led to new reading audiences and new reception
histories for fantastic texts from other countries of origin.
1

Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy, p. 4, Stephen Prickett, Victorian Fantasy, pp. 12–13. Jack Zipes also discusses,
particularly, the nineteenth-century literary fairy tale as a critique of the Industrial Revolution in When Dreams
Came True: Classical Fairy Tales and Their Tradition, p. 147.
2
The actual Latin American wars for independence are outside our time frame (1808–1833), but contributors arewelcome to consider literary works that were published later but responded to these events.

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In this volume, we especially encourage contributors to consider topics that engage with morethan one city or cultural context, or ones that explore different moments of cross-culturalinteraction and contacts. Possible cities include (but are not limited to) Paris, Berlin, Cape Town,Cairo, Istanbul, Beirut, Mumbai, Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, Taipei, Seoul, Tokyo,Melbourne, Sydney, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Santiago, Buenos Aires, Dublin,Glasgow, Edinburgh, Manchester, and London. Contributors might consider how writers makeuse of the fantastic mode to come to terms with new urban realities, or to negotiate their senseof (cultural) identity in the ever-changing metropolitan spaces. Other questions that they canconsider include the following: In what ways does an investigation into the fantastic in different
urban settings complicate our understanding of its potential in contesting real-and-fictive
boundaries that condition or limit people’s ways of life, and their accessibility to different urban
spaces because of race, gender and class? How might the fantastic be used as a strategy inliterary texts that seek to interrogate or negotiate one’s relationship with the others in cities thatwere increasingly multicultural in outlook in the long nineteenth century? How might the fantastic
be used as a form of resistance against colonial rule, or as an act of writing against the Empire?
How might writers invoke the mythic and the fantasized characters from their own literary andcultural tradition when representing or negotiating the urban spaces and the underlying
ideological assumptions? In what ways can the fantastic and the everyday co-exist and be used
to interrogate new social realities?
We note that the terms fantasy and the more recently coined urban fantasy are anachronisticand highly contested terms—labels used in retrospect, sometimes in narrowly defined andsometimes in broad senses, to describe existing modes and genres. Contributors to this volume
are free to draw on the theoretical accounts of the fantastic that best suit their project and thecritical tradition from which they write. Contributors, however, should be consistent in theirusage and should note, as needed and to avoid confusion, the varying ways in which their terms
have been used.
Topics of interest:
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Types of fantasy that involve the city
Imperial and/or colonial cities and fantasy
Industrialization, urbanization, and fantasy
Border/Boundary/Liminality: how the fantastic mode is being used to confront, mediateor negotiate liminal spaces, or various forms of “borders” and boundaries in different
cultural contexts
Medievalized cities in nineteenth-century fantasy
Periodicals and fantasy
Cities in conversation
Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century responses to European or American fantasies inareas and regions such as Asia, Africa, Australia, Oceania, and vice versa
Different fantastic modes and traditions (such as Zhiguai), and their usage andadaptations in urban contexts
Orientalized cities, such as translations of the Arabian Nights in the nineteenth century
and their impact on subsequent literary productions
The city as a place of publication for fantasy (in periodicals or books); urban readers offantasy--the types of fantasy they read.
Nineteenth-century cities and fantastic Romantic legacies
The city and the collection of fairy tales and folklore

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The Gothic and the City
The Everyday and the City: how everyday spaces become sites of fantasy; how thefantastic responds to, or resists against, the everyday
Nostalgia, fantasy and the city
Fantastic urban utopias and/or fantasy and urban reform
Fantasy and cultural identity
Urban Typologies, architecture and fantasy
Urban palimpsest and fantasy
Reading fantastic cities in translation
The reception history of a city’s fantasies either within that city and/or in other cities
across the globe

If you are interested in contributing to the edited volume, please send a short bio (100–150words) and a 400-word abstract outlining the topic and the content, including the key authors
and/or texts that will be covered in your essay, to the editors, Dr Klaudia Lee(hiuylee@cityu.edu.hk) and Dr Sharin Schroeder (sharinschroeder@mail.ntut.edu.tw) by 15January.
The deadline for full chapters, 6,000–7,000 words in length (including notes and works cited),
will be subject to the final decision of the publisher. We look forward to reading your proposals.