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Infrastructures of Crisis in Global Twenty-First-Century Literature

By Lucy Neave

Format

£19.99

About this book

Examines real-world crisis narratives as represented in literary texts including nuclear disaster, the ‘refugee crisis’, global pandemics and climate change
  • Examines the ‘crisis’ in literary criticism by examining how literary texts engage with questions around close reading
  • Takes account of how crisis discourse is complicated and used ironically in a range of literary texts
  • Engages with developments in scholarship on infrastructure in literary texts
  • Uses ‘crisis’ novels to evaluate approaches to reading texts’ political interventions
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.

Reviews

Infrastructures of Crisis provides at once a sharp critical perspective and a much-needed reprieve. This book is unique in how it brings together seemingly disparate crises – from climate change to refugee claims, from pandemics to nuclear meltdowns. Neave’s approach is calm, measured and clear-eyed, a true rarity in our crisis-ridden, crisis-driven and crisis-dependent world.
Table of contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Real-World Catastrophes in Global Twenty-First-Century Literature: Discourse, Infrastructure and Affect
1. Crisis as Infrastructure: Chernobyl Prayer (1997) and Chernobyl (2019)
2. Crisis as Figure: Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend But the Mountains (2018) and Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017)
3. 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)
4. 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

Works Cited
Index

About the author

Lucy Neave

Lucy Neave is Associate Professor in English and Creative Writing at the Australian National University. She is the author of two award-winning novels. Her scholarship has appeared in Textual Practice, Journal of Australian Literature, New Writing and Journal of Commonwealth Literature, among others. She has been a visiting scholar at New York University, the University of Virginia, and CUNY Graduate Center’s Committee on Globalization and Social Change, and is a former Fulbright scholar.