Mutant Narratives in Ecological Science Fiction

Thinking with Embodied Estrangement

Kaisa Kortekallio

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781350296848
• eBook ISBN: 9781350296787
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Using an innovative multidisciplinary approach which is deeply invested in posthumanist thought, this book demonstrates how reading science fiction shapes the way we engage with lived environments. In dialogue with works by widely studied science fiction authors Greg Bear, N.K. Jemisin, Paolo Bacigalupi, and Jeff VanderMeer, it draws out how they function as mutant narratives. The first to systematically integrate three fields – feminist posthumanism, cognitive narratology, and science fiction studies – it offers a complex and coherent understanding of readerly experience as material, embodied, dynamic, and imaginative. Covering a range of urgent topics, including climate fiction, New Weird fiction, and new phenomenologies of the body, this book is the first to demonstrate how readerly experience acts as a site for ethical and political reorientation in the time of climate change.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Dedication Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Literary Scholars in the Anthropocene
• 2 More-than-Human Reading and Experiential Change
• 3 Mutant Figures and Reading Bodies
• 4 Readerly Choreographies and Paolo Bacigalupi’s Climate Fiction
• 5 Embodied Estrangement and Jeff VanderMeer’s The Southern Reach
• 6 Conclusion: More-than-Human Reading and Subjective Experience
• References
• Index
• Copyright Page