Temporalities in/of Crises in Anglophone Literatures

Sibylle Baumbach, Birgit Neumann, Sibylle Baumbach, Birgit Neumann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN:
  9781032390376
  9781032390307
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000922974
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Historical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Literary works play a crucial role in modelling and conceptualising temporalities. This becomes particularly apparent in times of crises, which put conventionalised temporal patterns and routines under pressure. During crises, past, present, and future appear to collapse into each other and give way to temporal disjunction and rupture. Offering pluralised and context-sensitive approaches to temporalities in and of crises, this volume explores how literature's engagement with crises suggests both the need for and possibility of rethinking 'time'. The volume is committed to examining the affordances of specific genres and their potential in pointing beyond temporalities of crises to facilitate a sense of futurity. Individual essays are grounded in recent theories of temporality and literary form, which are related to novel advancements in ecocriticism, queer studies, affect theory, and postcolonial studies. The chapters cover a broad range of examples from different literary genres to reveal the knowledge of literature about temporalities in and of crises.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Whose Temporalities? Which Crises?: Temporalities in and of Crises in Anglophone Literatures
• 2 Time of the Seasons: Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet as Crisis Literature
• 3 Temporalising the Troubles: Anna Burns’s Milkman
• 4 The Entangled Times of COVID, Climate, and Race in the US: Reading the “Heterotemporality” of Colson Whitehead’s Zone One
• 5 Shakespeare, Auerbach, Vladislavić: Figural Readings and Temporalities of Crisis in Johannesburg
• 6 Forms of Futurity: The Entangled Temporalities of Eco-terror in the Niger Delta
• 7 “I Do I Did I Think I Thought”: Temporal Contiguities of Pregnancy and the Ecological Crisis
• 8 Lerner’s Lists: The Novel and the Time of Living
• 9 “Corked up in Cages”: Crisis, Control, and Communication in Waiting-Room Poetry
• 10 The Physics of Ravicka: Queer Temporalities of Renee Gladman’s Quadrilogy
• 11 The Scale of Time: Literary Figurations of Nuclear Temporalities
• 12 Crisis Time and Rereading
• Index