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Chapter 5 - Apocalypse

Co-evolutionary Futures

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2019

Caroline Edwards
Affiliation:
Birkbeck College, University of London
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Summary

This chapter considers the totalising scale of historical representation that post-apocalyptic narratives make possible. Claire Fuller’s Our Endless Numbered Days (2015), Maggie Gee’s The Flood (2004) and Jim Crace’s The Pesthouse (2007) blend speculative, science-fictional elements with a self-consciously literary experimentation of narrative voice and temporal structure. In their post-apocalyptic settings these novels move between religious and secular representations of historical time, and their different apocalypses all rehearse what I call a possible eschatology of nature, reconfiguring the relationship between humans and their natural environment. Mediating between a formal shift in the temporal scales of narration, a reformulated aesthetic of non-mimetic literary realism constructed through generic borrowing, and the enactment of an ecstatic relationship with apocalyptic nature, such texts demonstrate the ways in which utopian temporalities contribute towards a rejuvenation of narrative form as well as of the hermeneutic acts required to read them.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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  • Apocalypse
  • Caroline Edwards, Birkbeck College, University of London
  • Book: Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel
  • Online publication: 01 July 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108595568.005
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  • Apocalypse
  • Caroline Edwards, Birkbeck College, University of London
  • Book: Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel
  • Online publication: 01 July 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108595568.005
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Apocalypse
  • Caroline Edwards, Birkbeck College, University of London
  • Book: Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel
  • Online publication: 01 July 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108595568.005
Available formats
×