The Dark Matter of Children’s 'Fantastika' Literature

Following the 'material turn' in the humanities, this book brings perspectives from science and ecology into dialogue with children's fiction written and published in the UK and the USA in the twenty-first century. It develops the concept of 'entanglement', which originated in twentieth-century quantum physics but has been applied to cultural critique, through a reading of Fantastika literature. It surveys a wide-raging scope of literary texts, covering the gothic, fantasy and other forms of speculative fiction, to argue that Fantastika positions entanglemet as an ethical imperative that transforms our imaginative relationship with materiality. In doing so, it synthesizes perspectives from a similarly diverse range of areas, including ecology, physics, anthropology, biology and literary studies to examine the storied matter of children's Fantastika as ground from which we might to begin to imagine an as-yet-unrealised future that addresses the problems of our present.