- The volume will mostly appeal to researchers and scholars working in Tolkien studies and fantasy, but it will also potentially interest a large number of researchers whose work moves between and across areas of literary and cultural studies, genre theory and adaptation.
- The book will be of special interest to academics and students of comparative cultural and literary studies, and to Central European scholars who focus on the cultural impact and reception of fantasy and Tolkien's legacy in their own countries.
- The volume broadens and deepens the knowledge of Tolkien and fantasy in a context that is very little known in the Western world and adds to both Tolkien and fantasy scholarship by exploring the hitherto very sparsely discussed socialist and post-socialist Central European countries' views of the topic.
- Whilst accounting for the discrepancies in the reception of fantasy and unearthing reasons beyond political or aesthetic preferences both in scholarship and fandom, the collection seeks to map out the underlying entanglement of fantasy as a mode and Central European political and cultural shifts across the past 50 years.
- The collection also expands the concept of fantasy beyond a literary genre or a single interpretation. It emphasises the aggressive pervasiveness of the fantasy mode and traces the ways in which its haunting legacy permeates and subverts different modes and aesthetics across different cultural domains.
- Since fantasy has established itself as a mainstream component of university curricula at all levels, the volume will also be of interest to a large number of students. Undergraduate and MA readers will benefit from the innovative, comprehensive, and updated approach with which this collection integrates mainstream approaches to Tolkien's impact on contemporary fantasy and their multi-faceted re-emergences in a variety of arts and media from the 50s the present.
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