A review by mariebrunelm
Fantasy Aesthetics: Visualizing Myth and Middle Ages, 1880-2020 by Hans Rudolf Velten, Joseph Imorde

informative reflective slow-paced

This collection of essays touches on several topics that are very relevant to my PhD research on illustrations for J.R.R. and Christopher Tolkien. So much so that if I’d read it when I started in 2017 it would have given me quite the head start. As it is, I appreciated each chapter, whether I had moments of “aha, I see what you’re doing here” or “Mmmh, I’ll highlight this and come back to it later”. I loved all the discussions of pop culture (there was even one article about “unicorns in contemporary popular culture”), the studies of reception of the Middle Ages in Fantasy book covers or sci-fi TV series, and of course the many nods to J.R.R. Tolkien and William Morris. All in all a great collection of papers, and one I’ll come back to regularly.