Urban Fantasy: Exploring Modernity through Magic

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Urban Fantasy: Exploring Modernity through Magic

by Stefan Ekman

Lever Press, 2024

ISBNs

Paper: 978-1-64315-064-2

eISBN: 978-1-64315-065-9

About the Book

Winner of the 2025 Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Myth & Fantasy Studies

Finalist of the Locus Awards Non-Fiction Category
Finalist of the British Science Fiction Association Best Non-Fiction Award

Urban fantasy, the genre of fantastic literature in which magic and monsters meet modern society, is fairly young but has old roots. Stefan Ekman’s book, Urban Fantasy: Exploring Modernity through Magic, examines the genre in depth, including its inherent social commentary, its historical development, and its interplay between modernity and the fantastic.

The author draws on a wide range of urban fantasy texts from five decades, combining detailed analysis of dozens of novels and other media with broad discussions to provide a comprehensive understanding of the genre across three sections. The first section presents an overview of what the genre looks like today—both in terms of its common traits and its variety of settings—and how it has developed over time, including the history of urban fantasy scholarship. The second section examines urban fantasy’s core concern with the unseen, for example through a focus on unseen individuals overlooked by society or hiding within it, and on ignored urban spaces or labyrinthine undergrounds. The third section addresses how urban fantasy explores the relationship between the supernatural and modernity. Ekman offers readings of fiction by Ben Aaronovitch, Lauren Beukes, P. Djelí Clark, Charles de Lint, Neil Gaiman, Max Gladstone, Kim Harrison, N.K. Jemisin, and Megan Lindholm, among others.

Urban Fantasy will appeal to teachers and students of the fantastic as well as to urban fantasy enthusiasts and literary scholars. Ekman illuminates the genre’s evolution and defining traits, inviting readers to rethink urban fantasy as a creative tool for using magic to explore modernity.

About the Author

Dr. Stefan Ekman is a fantasy scholar affiliated with Karlstad University, Sweden. He has published extensively on urban fantasy, critical world-building, and fantasy maps. He is the author of Here Be Dragons: Exploring Fantasy Maps and Settings (Wesleyan University Press, 2013).

Reviews

"Ekman writes with a clarity and directness that remains too uncommon in academic studies, and while he cites an impressive array of scholarship going back decades, he rather wisely segregates his more theoretical arguments into separate chapters explaining with admirable precision exactly what he means by modernity, or how specific protocols like focalization are informing his discussions of fiction...[Urban Fantasy] gives us a very useful framework for the arguments we are going to have anyway."— Gary K. Wolfe, Locus Magazine

2025 Non-Fiction Category Finalist

— Locus Awards

“The book is a lively and thorough introduction to the ever-growing and much-loved genre of urban fantasy. Though an academic work, Urban Fantasy: Exploring Modernity through Magic is neither formulaic nor timid and provides descriptions of many works and series to back up Ekman's arguments.”

— Phillip Fitzsimmons, Mythlore

"Stefan Ekman’s long-awaited book on Urban Fantasy proves to have been well worth the wait. With characteristic clarity and precision he presents us with his findings on the genre: for Ekman, urban fantasy brings fantastic or supernatural tropes into direct engagement with the modern (a concept he helpfully explains), giving special attention to the unseen, from marginalised communities and neglected spaces to authoritarian secret societies, criminal organizations and hidden parallel worlds. In the process, it returns repeatedly to ‘social commentary’, a focus on the politics of living among the ever-changing contradictions of modernity. After tracing the history of the genre through a range of ‘pre-urban fantasies’, Ekman demonstrates how it has gone on to transform itself through the decades by braiding into these core concerns a series of new narrative threads from other genres, each tailored to the needs and obsessions of a new generation. This ongoing process of braiding explains why there are so many different opinions current about what constitutes urban fantasy. In his coda Ekman offers a ‘short answer’ to this question; but his book presents us with a rich abundance of terms, ideas, and further questions which fans and scholars will be debating for years to come. In doing so it makes a major contribution to the field of fantasy studies."— Rob Maslen, Honorary Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic, University of Glasgow

2025 Scholarship Award in Myth Fantasy Studies Winner

— Mythopoeic

Best Non-Fiction Award Finalist

— British Science Fiction Association

"In this comprehensive and fascinating study of urban fantasy, Stefan Ekman shows how the genre emerged as one of the major expressions of modernity. Like cyberpunk fiction or the hard-boiled detective novel, urban fantasies reveal the disruptions and distractions of contemporary life while also offering glimpses of utopian possibility."— Brian Attebery, Author of Fantasy: How It Works

“In this fascinating and original book, Stefan Ekman compellingly argues that urban fantasy is a genre in its own right. The impressive breadth of fiction considered in the book is matched by in-depth case studies to develop this innovative argument and show that the genre is deeply concerned with the conditions of modernity. This book is a must-have for anyone interested in studies of fantasy and/or literatures of modernity.”— Helen Young, Senior Research Fellow in Literary Studies, Deakin University