Walking Shadows ─ Reflections on the American Fantastic and the American Grotesque from Washington Irving to the Postmodern Era

Johansen investigates why the fantastic and the grotesque have been so central to American literature--as opposed to the European dabbling in them--since the country began. Foregrounding the transgressive impetus of the genres, he looks at the realm of theory, 19th-century phantasmagorias, spectral Americas, and from modernism to postmodernism. His topics include Rip Van Winkle's fall into history: framing Washington Irving's tale, the apocalyptic-grotesque in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death," commemorating the black and angry dead in Toni Morrison's Beloved, and inside the American nightmare: Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho and its cultural context. Annotation c2015 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)

Ib Johansen, emiritus Professor of the English Department at the University of Aarhus, 1971-2008. He published books on Danish Renaissance interludes and on fantastic literature in Denmark from the early nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries, and furthermore edited Fins de Siecle / New Beginnings (Unipress.dk, 2000). Apart from that he has published numerous articles on fantastic literature and science fiction in various critical anthologies and literary reviews, and translated a number of German- and English-speaking poets into Danish.