Description

Fiction and the Sixth Mass Extinction is one of the first works to focus specifically on fiction’s engagements with human driven extinction. Drawing together a diverse group of scholars and approaches, this volume pairs established voices in the field with emerging scholars and traditionally recognized climate fiction ('cli-fi') with texts and media typically not associated with Anthropocene fictions. The result is a volume that both engages with and furthers existing work on Anthropocene fiction as well as laying groundwork for the budding subfield of extinction fiction. This volume takes up the collective insistence on the centrality of story to extinction studies. In various and disparate ways, each chapter engages with the stories we tell about extinction, about the extinction of animal and plant life, and about the extinction of human life itself. Answering the call to action of extinction studies, these chapters explore what kinds of humanity caused this event and what kinds may live through it; what cultural assumptions and values led to this event and which ones could lead out of it; what relationships between human life and this planet allowed the sixth mass extinction and what alternative relationships could be possible.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments…………………………………………………

Introduction: The Urgency of Story During the Sixth Mass Extinction

Jonathan Elmore……………………………………………

Chapter 1: Telling Stories about Dying (Out): Thomas Pynchon’s Global Novels and the

Anthropocene Extinction

Michael Fuchs…………………………………………….

Chapter 2: “Life Finds a Way”: Jurassic Park, Jurassic World, and Extinction Anxiety

Christy Tidwell……………………………………………

Chapter 3: “The Integrity of Nature”: A Comparative Analysis of Environmental Anxieties in the

Fictions of H.P. Lovecraft and Jeff VanderMeer

Kristen Figgins…………………………………………….

Chapter 4: “My Heart Slowly Cracks”: Making Kin and Living through Extinction in Erdrich’s

Future Home of the Living God

Bridgitte Barclay………………………………………….

Chapter 5: “You Are Here”: Extinction as Familial in The Broken Earth

Erin DeYoung……………………………………………

Chapter 6: The Uncanny, the Weird, and the Eerie: Hyperobjects and Anthropocenic Modalities

in China Miéville’s Three Moments of an Explosion

Allan Rae…………………………………………………

Chapter 7: The Tragic Comedy of Humanity: Life after Species Extinction in Éric Chevillard’s Sans

l’orang-outan

Christina Lord…………………………………………….

Chapter 8: Godly Mass Extinction: Robert J. Sawyer’s Calculating God and Extinction’s

Teleologies

Jenni G. Halpin…………………………………………..

About the Contributors

Product details

Published 01 Apr 2020
Format Hardback
Edition 1st
Extent 178
ISBN 9781793619198
Imprint Lexington Books
Dimensions 233 x 160 mm
Series Ecocritical Theory and Practice
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

Anthology Editor

Jonathan Elmore

Contributor

Jonathan Elmore

Contributor

Michael Fuchs

Contributor

Christy Tidwell

Contributor

Kristen Figgins

Contributor

Erin DeYoung

Contributor

Allan Rae

Contributor

Christina Lord

Contributor

Jenni G Halpin

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