(Eco)Anxiety in Nuclear Holocaust Fiction and Climate Fiction
Doomsday Clock Narratives
Dominika Oramus
- 192 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
(Eco)Anxiety in Nuclear Holocaust Fiction and Climate Fiction
Doomsday Clock Narratives
Dominika Oramus
About This Book
(Eco)Anxiety in Nuclear Holocaust Fiction and Climate Fiction: Doomsday Clock Narratives demonstrates that disaster fictionâ nuclear holocaust and climate change alikeâ allows us to unearth and anatomise contemporary psychodynamics and enables us to identify pretraumatic stress as the common denominator of seemingly unrelated types of texts. These Doomsday Clock Narratives argue that earth's demise is soon and certain. They are set after some catastrophe and depict people waiting for an even worse catastrophe to come. References to geology are particularly importantâ in descriptions of the landscape, the emphasis falls on waste and industrial bric- a- brac, which is seen through the eyes of a future, posthuman archaeologist. Their protagonists have the uncanny feeling that the countdown has already started, and they are coping with both traumatic memories and pretraumatic stress. Readings of novels by Walter M. Miller, Nevil Shute, John Christopher, J. G. Ballard, George Turner, Maggie Gee, Paolo Bacigalupi, Ruth Ozeki, and Yoko Tawada demonstrate that the authors are both indebted to a century- old tradition and inventively looking for new ways of expressing the pretraumatic stress syndrome common in contemporary society. This book is written for an academic audience (postgraduates, researchers, and academics) specialising in British Literature, American Literature, and Science Fiction Studies.