Introduction

This is a theoretical chapter which unfolds in three parts: first, it conceptualises “uncanny un-worlding” – a process of disintegration in familiar worldviews triggered by the capitalist world-ecology’s systemic crisis. Second, it challenges traditional realism and explores the critical potential of irrealism and scalar narrative. Ultimately, out of this constellation of ideas emerges Uncanny Realism, a literary-critical framework developed to analyse how literature confronts and renders this unravelling of capitalist realism. It centres on six methodological axes: (1) hybridism of genre and form, where realism is haunted by speculative, gothic, and oral traditions; (2) scalar reading, which examines how texts portray collisions between vastly different temporal and spatial dimensions; (3) uncanny objects, which are seemingly ordinary items that, upon closer examination, defy clear boundaries between human and non-human, as well as between local, global, and planetary scales, thereby unsettling the reader’s perception of the familiar and exposing hidden interdependencies; (4) clusters of uncanniness, which reflect the growing scarcity of capitalism’s foundational resources through non-mimetic narrative shifts; (5) narrative unreliability, where fragmented, multi-perspective storytelling mirrors epistemological collapse; and (6) the blurring of life–death boundaries, where liminal characters and inter-worlds symbolise the Anthropocene’s disintegration of stable meaning. Together, these categories offer a critical toolkit for interpreting literature that grapples with the spectral, hybrid, and estranged conditions of our contemporary world.