Microtopias: The post-apocalyptic communities of Jim Crace's the Pesthouse

Abstract

This article traces the dissolution of mass utopianism and development of minor utopias in critical and literary theory, and looks at the ways in which these concerns are being explored in contemporary British fiction. Focusing on Jim Crace's novel The Pesthouse (2007), the article develops a 'microtopian' literary analysis: a strategy for reading the relationship between narrative subjects and their socialities that identifies utopian 'moments of possibility' at their most minor or minimalist, self-reflexive scale. I argue that the narrative framework of The Pesthouse has some very important implications for the study of contemporary literary utopias, particularly with regard to the scale of their possibility. Crace's deconstruction of the mass utopian myth of emigration in the novel - a post-apocalyptic reversal of manifest destiny - thus serves to reveal the microcosmic scale at which a successful logic of community can operate. Such issues reveal the 'critical' as well as 'minor' nature of the microtopian moments of possibility in The Pesthouse, reflecting trends in recent utopian and political thinking. © 2009 Taylor & Francis.