Fantasy ideology smuggles feudal nostalgia into imagined other worlds

Evidence

Yet Lovecraft’s texts are exemplary of Weird, rather than straightforwardly Gothic, fiction. Weird fiction has its own consistency, which can be most clearly delineated by comparing it to two adjacent modes, fantasy and the uncanny. Fantasy (and Tolkien is the exemplar here) presupposes a completed world, a world that, although superficially different to “ours” (there may be different species, or supernatural forces) is politically all-too familiar (there is usually some nostalgia for the ordered organisation of feudal hierarchy). The uncanny, meanwhile, is set in “our” world — only that world is no longer “ours” any more, it no longer coincides with itself, it has been estranged. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1104

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s running account of fantasy as compensatory nostalgia (ch 25: compensatory fantasy of Family Nation and Heroism) and to modernist critiques of Tolkien-type fantasy. — connects to: Nostalgic pasts serve as fantasies where duty and enjoyment coincide — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 269; Fantasy’s rise tracks capitalism’s defeat of alternative reality structures — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 376; Compensatory fantasy of Family Nation and Heroism drives capitulation to capitalism — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 377 (+8 more)

Broader Connections

• New World monsters repeated medieval Other-anxieties rather than reflecting observed reality #exemplifies (0.85) — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 582
• Modern Muslim monsters rest on medieval fantasies #exemplifies (0.85) — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 351
• Utopian impulses realize future projections disguised as nostalgia #contradicts (0.80) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 299
• Crusader contact reinforced fantasy rather than correcting misconceptions #corroborates (0.80) — Chris Allen, Islamophobia, 175
• Cynical disbelief masks an unconscious ideological fantasy structuring reality #expands (0.78) — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 30
• Nostalgia for an imagined golden age drives resistance and fear #exemplifies (0.75) — Andrew L. Whitehead, American Idolatry, 199
• History might be generated from the present’s own fantasy projections #expands (0.75)
• Speculative imagination is a generative social force integrated into everyday capitalist life #complicates (0.72) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 74