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Book Cover for: The Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Novel: Critical Temporalities and the End Times, Diletta de Cristofaro

The Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Novel: Critical Temporalities and the End Times

Diletta de Cristofaro

Traditional apocalyptic texts concern the advent of a better world at the end of history that will make sense of everything that happened before. But what is at stake in the contemporary shift to apocalyptic narratives in which the utopian end of time is removed?

The Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Novel offers an innovative critical model for our cultural obsession with 'the end' by focussing on the significance of time in the 21st-century post-apocalyptic novel and challenging traditional apocalyptic logic. Once confined to the genre of science fiction, the increasing popularity of end-of-the-world narratives has caused apocalyptic writing to feature in the work of some of contemporary literature's most well-known fiction writers. Considering novels by Will Self, Cormac McCarthy, David Mitchell, Emily St. John Mandel, Jeanette Winterson and others, Diletta De Cristofaro frames the contemporary apocalyptic imagination as a critique of modernity's apocalyptic conception of time and history. Interdisciplinary in scope, the book historicises apocalyptic beliefs by exploring how relentlessly they have shaped the modern world.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
  • Publish Date: Jun 17th, 2021
  • Pages: 208
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 9.21in - 6.14in - 0.44in - 0.65lb
  • EAN: 9781350235939
  • Categories: Modern - 21st CenturyScience Fiction & Fantasy

About the Author

Cristofaro, Diletta de: - Diletta De Cristofaro is Assistant Professor in English Literature at Northumbria University, UK.
Cheyette, Bryan: - Bryan Cheyette is Chair in Modern Literature and Culture at the University of Reading. He is the editor or author of ten books, most recently Diasporas of the Mind: Jewish and Postcolonial Writing and the Nightmare of History (2014) and (with Peter Boxall) volume seven of the Oxford History of the Novel in English (on the British and Irish novel, 1940-present) (2016). He reviews contemporary fiction and criticism for the Times Literary Supplement and various newspapers.
Eve, Martin Paul: - Martin Paul Eve is Professor of Literature, Technology and Publishing at Birkbeck College, University of London, UK. He is the author of Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies and the Future (2014); Pynchon and Philosophy: Wittgenstein, Foucault and Adorno (2014); Password (2016); and Literature Against Criticism: University English and Contemporary Fiction in Conflict.

Praise for this book

Set to become a landmark study of 21st century fiction, this wide-ranging, thought-provoking study is an invaluable resource, representing original work of the highest order, from a writer both engagingly readable and critically sophisticated.
Judie Newman, OBE, Professor of American and Canadian Studies, University of Nottingham