The Routledge Companion to Literatures and Crisis

1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-032-42464-4
Verlag: Taylor & Francis

Buch, Englisch, 488 Seiten, Format (B × H): 170 mm x 244 mm, Gewicht: 975 g

Reihe: Routledge Literature Companions

The Routledge Companion to Literatures and Crisis provides deep insight into a complex and multi-layered phenomenon. The third decade of the twenty-first century is being marked by a polycrisis caused by various world crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, armed conflicts and climate change leading to economic, geopolitical, environmental, health and security crises.

Featuring 42 chapters, the collection examines crises through literary texts in relation to the environment, finance, migration and diaspora, war, human rights, values and identity, health, politics, terrorism and technology. It illuminates the many faces of the current permacrisis as well as the multifarious crises of the past and their representation in literatures across ages and cultures—from the Viking wars, Black Death in mediaeval Europe, technology in ancient China and the crisis of power in Elizabethan England to imperial biopower in nineteenth-century India, the genocides in the twentieth century, upsurge of domestic violence during the Covid lockdown in Spain and the development of AI.

The Companion connects diverse cultures, disciplines and academic traditions to show how and why literature, media and art can voice all types of crises across times. It will be a key resource for students and researchers in a broad range of areas including literature, film studies, narrative studies, cultural studies, international politics and ecocriticism.

Chapters: Chapter 6 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate and Undergraduate Advanced

Autoren/Hrsg.

Pellicer-Ortín, Silvia

Kuznetski, Julia

Battisti, Chiara

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Stoffe, Motive und Themen
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politikwissenschaft Allgemein
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Contributors



Introduction: Literature and crises across historical scales

Julia Kuznetski, Chiara Battisti and Silvia Pellicer-Ortin



PART I – ADDRESSING CRISES THROUGH LITERATURE

I.I Theoretical approaches to crises

1. What matters: Literature’s importance in times of crisis

Jean-Michel Ganteau

2. The ethics and value of literature in times of crisis

Susana Onega

3. Whose crisis? Framing 9/11 and the “war on terror”

Michael C. Frank

4. Migration crisis in contemporary literature: A complicated journey through loss and hope

Merve Sarikaya-Sen

5. War, migration and human rights: Strategies of voicing in contemporary fiction

Sue Vice

6. Care crisis

Lisa Baraitser and Laura Salisbury

7. Climate crisis and literature: Towards propositive narratives

Gala Arias Rubio



I.II Literary genres and crises

8. Physical and spiritual crises in mediaeval and early English Renaissance drama

Paul Majkut

9. Lines of exposure: Poetry and crisis

Charles I. Armstrong

10. Life-writing practices: A way out of crisis?

Silvia Pellicer-Ortín

11. Too burning for fiction? Women writing nonfiction in times of crisis

Julia Kuznetski

12. The resilient frame: Graphic narratives and crises representation

Chiara Battisti

13. Ecosystems of change in the Baltics: Decoloniality and storytelling in art

Ieva Astahovska

14. "When it changed": Crisis in science fiction and speculative literature

Raphael Kabo



PART II - CRISES IN LITERATURES ACROSS THE WORLD

II.I Political and ideological crises in a historical perspective

15. Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini: literature as the art of mediation

Fabio Forner

16. “Fair sequence and succession”: Shakespeare and the Elizabethan succession crisis

Harvey Wiltshire

17. The Devil in disguise: Writing the witch in Jacobean law and literature

Ian Ward

18. Annus mirabilis and the rhyming of history

Paul Majkut

19. This is not a crisis. The rhetorical construction of an epistemic and ideological crisis (Sweden)

Leif Dahlberg

20. The crisis of polarisation: The example of Jonathan Coe

Robert Eaglestone



II.II War, migration and violence

21. The inexhaustible human vectors: War, crisis, literature—from Beowulf to Ian McEwan

Eva M. Pérez-Rodríguez

22. Identity struggles and domestic turmoil in Ayse Kulin’s Tutsak günes

Emrah Atasoy

23. The crisis of humanism, the Holocaust, and “The Jewish Dog” as a de/re-humanising figure in French literature

Helena Duffy

24. Hermeneutical (in) justice and crisis: A case study of Belfast and the “Troubles”

Cecilia Beecher Martins

25. Poetry as an anthropological trailblazer in situations of crisis: Russophone poets’ answer Russia’s aggression against Ukraine and catastrophic transformation of the political regime (2022—2024)

Ilya Kukulin

26. The year war did not begin: Representations of war in Estonian literature

Piret Viires



II.III Values and identity crises

27. One man’s dystopia is another woman’s Utopia: Humanity revolutionised, according to Stanislawa Przybyszewska

Ksenia Shmydkaya

28. Experiences, learning and consequences of the pandemic: A critical eye at Spanish literature through the text of Marta Sanz

Noelia Núñez Preza

29. Ukrainian literary imaginaries of the past after 1991: From substitution to restoration?

Alexander Dmitriev

30. Liminal states of consciousness and crises of affect in contemporary Chinese literature

Ivan Stacy

31. Transitory identities and heterotopic spaces of crisis in the narratives of contemporary Brazilian women writers

Izabel Brandão

32. Crises down under: An approach to values and identity in contemporary Australian writing

Bárbara Arizti

33. Epic voices from Africa: Historical decolonial re-writings

Eugenia Ossana



II.IV. Environmental crises and biopolitics

34. “Art in crisis”: The novel in the age of digital media and global change

Markku Lehtimäki

35. Biopolitics and crisis in South Asian literary representations of midwifery and surrogacy

Antonia Navarro-Tejero

36.Transecology repairs the capitalist metabolic rift? A reading of Chôsansei [Birth conscription] by Japanese novelist Tanaka Chôko

MORITA Keitaro



II.V Technological crises and posthumanism

37. Technological crisis and posthumanity in Chinese philosophy and literature

Chan Kit-sze Amy

38. Crisis, in extremis: Posthuman vulnerability in Jean-Baptiste Francois Xavier Cousin de Grainville’s The last man

Ivan Callus

39. “If you are a man Winston, you are the last man:” Social crisis and the wounded storyteller in the dystopian universe of George Orwell’s Nineteen eighty-four

Sidia Fiorato

40. Transhumanism and posthumanism: The enhancement or the end of the human?

Daniela Carpi

41. Literature at the crossroad in digital age: A case study at IULM University

Paola Carbone

42. The Pause Letter, the existential AI crisis and digital ideology

Anders Hedman



Index

Über Autor(innen)

Silvia Pellicer-Ortín is Associate Professor at the Department of English and German Philology in the Faculty of Education of the University of Zaragoza, Spain. She has co-edited several books, including Trauma Narratives and Herstory (with Sonya Andermahr; 2013) and Memory Frictions in Contemporary Literature (with María Jesús Martínez-Alfaro; 2017).

Julia Kuznetski is Professor of English at the School of Humanities of Tallinn University, Estonia. Her work includes Women on the Move: Body, Memory and Femininity in Present-Day Transnational Diasporic Writing (co-edited with Silvia Pellicer-Ortín; Routledge, 2019).

Chiara Battisti is an Associate Professor of Anglo-American Languages and Literatures at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures of the University of Verona, Italy. Her publications include Tailoring Identities in Victorian Literature (2023) and Islands in Geography, Law, and Literature (co-edited with S. Fiorato, M. Nicolini, T. Perrin; 2022).