Contemporary Women's Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

Abstract

Includes index. 'This is an impressive study, homing in on a notable gap in writing within the apocalyptic tradition. It is engagingly written, extensive in its choice of texts and, throughout, the textual analysis is in productive dialogue with critical theory. Repeatedly, we learn how the fiction of elsewhere and the fiction of the future urgently speak to our here and now. -- Mary Eagleton, author of Clever Girls and the Literature of Womens Upward Mobility (2018) This book examines how contemporary women novelists have successfully transformed and rewritten the conventions of post-apocalyptic fiction. Since the dawn of the new millennium, there has been an outpouring of writing that depicts the end of the world as we know it, and women writers are no exception to this trend. However, the book argues that their fiction is distinctive. Contemporary womens work in this genre avoids conservatism, a nostalgic mourning for the past, and the focus on restoring what has been lost, aspects key to much maleauthored apocalyptic fiction. Instead, contemporary women writers show readers the ways in which patriarchy and neo-colonialism are intrinsically implicated in the disasters they envision, and offer qualified hope for a new beginning for society, culture and literature after an imagined apocalyptic event. Exploring science, nature and matter, the posthuman body, the maternal imaginary, time, narrative and history, literature and the word, and the post-secular, the book covers a wide variety of writers and addresses issues of nationality, race and ethnicity, as well as gender and sexuality. Susan Watkins is a Professor of Womens Writing at Leeds Beckett University. Her key publications include Twentieth-Century Women Novelists: Feminist Theory into Practice (2001), Doris Lessing (2010) and (as co-editor) Scandalous Fictions: The Twentieth-Century Novel in the Public Sphere (2006), Doris Lessing: Border Crossings (2009) and The History of British Womens Writing Vol 9: 1 945-1975 (2017). 1. Introduction: Rewriting and Transforming Traditions -- 2. Science, Nature and Matter -- 3. The Posthuman Body -- 4. The Maternal Imagination -- 5. Time, Narrative and History -- 6. Literature and the Word -- Conclusion: The Postsecular.