Book contents
- Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel
- Cambridge Studies in Twenty-First-Century Literature and Culture
- Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Chapter 1 Introduction
- Chapter 2 Reading Fictions of the Not Yet
- Chapter 3 Death
- Chapter 4 Transmigration
- Chapter 5 Apocalypse
- Chapter 6 Epilogue
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 5 - Apocalypse
Co-evolutionary Futures
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 July 2019
- Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel
- Cambridge Studies in Twenty-First-Century Literature and Culture
- Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Chapter 1 Introduction
- Chapter 2 Reading Fictions of the Not Yet
- Chapter 3 Death
- Chapter 4 Transmigration
- Chapter 5 Apocalypse
- Chapter 6 Epilogue
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
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.
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- Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel , pp. 154 - 196Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2019