Helen Young is an Honorary Associate of the Department of English at the University of Sydney, Australia.

Introduction: Re-thinking Genre, Thinking About Race 1. Founding Fantasy: J. R. R. Tolkien and Robert E. Howard 2. Forming Habits: Derivation, Imitation, and Adaptation 3. The Real Middle Ages: Gritty Fantasy 4. Orcs and Otherness: Monsters on Page and Screen 5. Popular Culture Postcolonialism 6. Relocating Roots: Urban Fantasy 7. Breaking Habits and Digital Communication Afterword

This book illuminates the racialized nature of 21st-C Western popular culture by studying how discourses of race circulate in popular Fantasy. It examines the struggles over race, racism, and white privilege enacted within creative works and surrounding communities. An interdisciplinary approach, drawing on Literary, Cultural, Fan, and Whiteness Studies, offers a cultural history of the anxieties of Western pop culture in a century eager to declare itself post-race. It explores major texts, and the impact of franchises, industry, editorial and authorial practices, and fan engagements on race and representation, making a vital contribution to studies of race, Fantasy, and 21st-C pop culture.