'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 Women's 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
women's 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 Women's 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 Women's Writing Vol 9: 1945-1975
(2017).
BÜCHER SCHNELL UND PORTOFREI MIT DHL
