Infrastructures of crisis in global twenty-first-century literature / Lucy Neave

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Neave, Lucy, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Crises in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (vii, 199 pages)

Place of Publication:

Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, [2025]

Summary:

"Discourse about crisis is pervasive in the mass media and scholarship, and in discussions about the discipline of literary studies. Contemporary narratives about crisis concern systems and infrastructures on which societies rely. This book critically engages with crises as events of excess which surpass containment efforts by governments and institutions: as occurrences that generate conflicting discourses, meanings and political responses and as entangled with visible and underlying structures. Infrastructures of Crisis concentrates on the evocation of infrastructure in literary and filmic texts about real-world events, such as nuclear accidents, the 'refugee crisis', pandemics and climate change, and works across scholarly conversations to examine how a range of cataclysms is figured, as well as how cultural products dramatise infrastructures' entanglements with neoliberalism and colonialism"-- De Gruyter Brill

Contents:

Introduction : Real-world catastrophes in global twenty-first-century literature : discourse, infrastructure and affect

Crisis as infrastructure : Chernobyl Prayer (1997) and Chernobyl (2019)

Crisis as figure : Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend But the Mountains (2018) and Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017)

Crisis as contagion : Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014), Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet (2020), and Ali Smith’s Summer (2020) and Companion Piece (2022)

Crisis as metonym : Gerald Vizenor’s Bearheart : The Heirship Chronicles (1990) and Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013)

Conclusion : Crisis, critique and infrastructure in literary studies

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index

Online resource; title from PDF title page (De Gruyter Brill, viewed October 27, 2025)

Other Format:

Print version: Neave, Lucy. Infrastructures of crisis in global twenty-first-century literature

ISBN:

9781399539555

1399539558

9781399539562

1399539566

OCLC:

1531304984

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license