Utopian and Dystopian Explorations of Pandemics and Ecological Breakdown
Entangled Futurities
Rhiannon Firth editor Heather Alberro editor Emrah Atasoy editor Nora Castle editor Conrad Scott editor
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Taylor & Francis Ltd
Published:31st Jul '24
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
This edited collection, which is situated within the environmental humanities and environmental social sciences, brings together utopian and dystopian representations of pandemics from across literature, the arts, and social movements.
Featuring analyses of literary works, TV and film, theater, politics, and activism, the chapters in this volume home in on critical topics such as posthumanism, multispecies futures, agency, political ecology, environmental justice, and Indigenous and settler-colonial environmental relations. The book asks: how do pandemics and ecological breakdown show us the ways that humans are deeply interconnected with the more-than-human world? And what might we learn from exploring those entanglements, both within creative works and in lived reality? Brazilian, Indian, Polish, and Dutch texts feature alongside classic literary works like Defoe’s A Journal of a Plague Year (1722) and Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954), as well as broader takes on movements like global youth climate activism. These investigations are united by their thematic interests in the future of human and nonhuman relationships in the shadow of climate emergency and increasing pandemic risk, as well as in the glimmers of utopian hope they exhibit for the creation of more just futures.
This exploration of how pandemics illuminate the entangled materialities and shared vulnerabilities of all living things is an engaging and timely analysis that will appeal to environmentally minded researchers, academics, and students across various disciplines within the humanities and social sciences.
The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
“Fully globalized, immediately connected, yet still radically unequal in resources and protections, humanity has now become aware of itself as a species in a new, more urgent way: when pathogens and environmental disruptions strike, how can past experiences and their representations provide perspective, balance, and hope? This book provides answers.”
James Engell,Gurney Professor of English and Professor of Comparative Literature, Harvard University, USA
“This book is a collection of diverse and passionately engaged explorations of the way we live now. It is imbued both with a sense of the traumas of (post)apocalypse and a hope that human and non-human species can find ways to survive into futures that are not simply continuations of a present scarred by pandemics, extinctions, and the eco-injustices of global capital. The essays here are international in scope, multiplex in their critical methodologies, and comprehensive in their coverage. They provide resources for thinking about how to move into futures in which, through this "breakdown," we take our non-anthropocentric place as one of the many species co-existing in an ecosystem that encompasses all life on the planet.”
Veronica Hollinger, Editor, Science Fiction Studies, and Professor Emerita of Cultural Studies, Trent University, Canada
“As the introduction describes, this timely book emerged out of a dark and precarious contemporary moment, in the world and in the field of utopian studies. By bringing together this collection of cutting-edge studies by such a diverse mix of scholars addressing one of the most disruptive and destructive events of recent times, the editors have delivered an insightful and impactful counterpoint to official and normative invitations to despair and capitulate. This volume is itself an act of utopian annunciation in the face of official denunciation. Read it, hope, and act.”
Tom Moylan, Professor Emeritus in the School of English, Irish, and Communication, and member of the Ralahine Centre for Utopian Studies, University of Limerick, Ireland
ISBN: 9781032385914
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 453g
232 pages