Psychick Albion (The fight against reality in post-war Britain)

Does fiction that inhabits a fantasy world have to be escapist or can it tell us something unexpectedly radical?

This book will look at a range of cultural products from the post-war period including children’s literature, horror films, the folk rock revival, television, fine art, and video games. The common thread amongst them is the positing of another world, an alternative reality, distinct from the mundane world of consensus reality. Although this might be dismissed as an escapist retreat from an increasingly complex Britain, this book will argue that the world of Psychick Albion is a resistance to the accelerating encroachment of capitalist space and time into our psychic lives. Pentecost argues that the world of mundane ‘reality’ can be understood as an ideological projection: a hallucination. When viewed in this way, the psychedelic hallucination of Psychick Albion can be weaponised as a genuine alternative to the world of capitalist realism. The book will take Mark Fisher’s idea of ‘Acid Communism’ as a launchpad to explore new possibilities of folklore, fantasy and urban wyrd. In doing so, new ways of thinking about our place in the emerging Anthropocene will become apparent. As an always present latent alternative to the neoliberal consensus, Psychick Albion becomes a vital way to imagine new futures.