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Table of contents (7 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
Reviews
“Hicks survey is potentially overwhelming. One can readily sympathize with these critics’ leeriness towards tidy solutions to such massive and systemic dangers.” (Derek C. Maus, Orbit, Vol. 7 (1), 2019)
“This is a book about the decline of the nation-state, the different ways to understand time, the many potential faces of human slavery, the evolving aesthetic of the sublime, the muddled balance sheet of postmodernism and dehumanizing labor, the power of language, the threat of human ignorance, and the seeming omnipresence of war. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above.” (P. L. Redditt, Choice, Vol. 54 (4), December, 2016)
"When the world ends in post-apocalyptic fictions, what is it, exactly, that ends? Maybe modernity, clearing the way for a return to the premodern; or maybe postmodernity, freeing the world to move 'forward into the past' of a renovated, reconceived modernity. Heather Hicks pursues the paradoxes and switchbacks of the post-apocalypse genre through a series of smart, resourceful, adventurous, and sure-footed readings of six of the genre's most accomplished twenty-first-century practitioners – Margaret Atwood, David Mitchell, Cormac McCarthy, Jeanette Winterson, Colson Whitehead, and Paulo Bacigalupi. It's the end of the world as we know it, and we feel . . . well, if not fine, then edified and illuminated, thanks to Heather Hicks' stirring book." - Brian McHale, Distinguished Professor of English, The Ohio State University, USA, and editor, Poetics Today
"In this timely work, Hicks investigates one of the most prolific genres in contemporary literature – the post-apocalyptic narrative. Her theoretical interventions will surprise you. Whether reading Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake series in relation to the Book of Revelation, applying postcolonial theory to the work of David Mitchell, or finding examples of Benjamin's dream kitsch in Whitehead's Zone One, Hicks's original approach helps us to rethink the meaning of modernity in the twenty-first century." - Lee Medovoi, Professor of English, University of Arizona, USA
"Hicks generates sophisticated thematic readings informed by psychoanalysis, studies of the novel, and cultural theory/anthropology. The method does not subordinate the novel to the historical context in which it was produced but rather situates it within a literary/generic history and web of thematic and textual referencing. The volume should prove central to any studies of twentieth-first-century apocalyptic fiction." - Amy J. Elias, Professor of English, University of Tennessee, USA
About the author
Heather J. Hicks is Associate Professor of English at Villanova University, USA. She is author of The Culture of Soft Work: Labor, Gender and Race in Postmodern American Narrative and has published in several journals including Postmodern Culture, Arizona Quarterly, Camera Obscura, and Contemporary Literature.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: The Post-Apocalyptic Novel in the Twenty-First Century
Book Subtitle: Modernity beyond Salvage
Authors: Heather J. Hicks
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137545848
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan New York
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-137-55366-9Published: 16 January 2016
Softcover ISBN: 978-1-349-71649-4Published: 18 March 2016
eBook ISBN: 978-1-137-54584-8Published: 08 April 2016
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: IX, 208
Topics: Twentieth-Century Literature, North American Literature, British and Irish Literature, European Literature, Fiction, Literary History