Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-m6dg7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-19T13:30:37.782Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 5 - Apocalypse

Co-evolutionary Futures

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2019

Caroline Edwards
Affiliation:
Birkbeck College, University of London
Get access

Summary

This chapter considers the totalising scale of historical representation that post-apocalyptic narratives make possible. Claire Fuller’s Our Endless Numbered Days (2015), Maggie Gee’s The Flood (2004) and Jim Crace’s The Pesthouse (2007) blend speculative, science-fictional elements with a self-consciously literary experimentation of narrative voice and temporal structure. In their post-apocalyptic settings these novels move between religious and secular representations of historical time, and their different apocalypses all rehearse what I call a possible eschatology of nature, reconfiguring the relationship between humans and their natural environment. Mediating between a formal shift in the temporal scales of narration, a reformulated aesthetic of non-mimetic literary realism constructed through generic borrowing, and the enactment of an ecstatic relationship with apocalyptic nature, such texts demonstrate the ways in which utopian temporalities contribute towards a rejuvenation of narrative form as well as of the hermeneutic acts required to read them.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • Apocalypse
  • Caroline Edwards, Birkbeck College, University of London
  • Book: Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel
  • Online publication: 01 July 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108595568.005
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Apocalypse
  • Caroline Edwards, Birkbeck College, University of London
  • Book: Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel
  • Online publication: 01 July 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108595568.005
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Apocalypse
  • Caroline Edwards, Birkbeck College, University of London
  • Book: Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel
  • Online publication: 01 July 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108595568.005
Available formats
×