Fantasy Aesthetics: Visualizing Myth and Middle Ages, 1880-2020

Fantasy novels are products of popular culture. They owe their popularity also to the visualization of medievalist artifacts on book covers and designs, illustrations, maps, and marketing: Castles on towering cliffs, cathedral-like architecture, armored heroes and enchanting fairies, fierce dragons and mages follow mythical archetypes and develop pictorial aesthetics of fantasy, completed by gothic fonts, maps and page layout that refer to medieval manuscripts and chronicles. The contributors to this volume explore the patterns and paradigms of a specific medievalist iconography and book design of fantasy which can be traced from the 19th century to the present.

Hans Rudolf Velten is a professor of Medieval German literature and language at Universität Siegen. He is currently principal investigator in the research program (SFB) »Transformationen des Populären« and has widely published in the fields of vernacular medieval literature and cultural theory. His research interests are in literature and culture of the late middle ages and early modern period, historical anthropology, theater history of the 15th and 16th centuries, and medievalism.

Joseph Imorde was a professor of art history at Universität Siegen until 2021 and is a principal investigator in the research program (SFB) »Transformationen des Populären«. Since 2022 he has been a professor of art history and vice president at the Kunsthochschule Weißensee in Berlin. His research centers on the historiography of art history, archaeology, anthropology, and ethnography.