This book reexamines the trope of the machine in the garden first laid out by Leo Marx fifty years ago. Contributors explore the lasting influence of this concept on American culture and the arts, rereading it as a dialectic wherein nature is as much technologized as technology is naturalized. Extending the relevance of Marx's theory from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, they examine filmic and literary representations of industrial, bureaucratic, and digital gardens; explore its role in the aftermath of the Civil War and of rural electrification during the New Deal; its significance in landscape art as well as in ethnic literatures; and discuss the historical premises and continued impact of Marx's study.

The fantastic represents a wide and heterogeneous field in literary, cultural, and media studies. Encompassing some of the field's foremost voices such as Fred Botting and Larissa Lai, as well as exciting new perspectives by junior scholars, this volume offers a mosaic of the fantastic now. The contributions pinpoint and discuss current developments in theory and practice by offering enlightening snapshots of the contemporary Anglophone landscape of research in the fantastic. The authors' arguments and analyses thus give new impetus to the field's theoretical and methodological approaches, its textual materials, its main interests, and its crucial findings.