Contemporary Women’s Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

‘This is an impressive study, homing in on a notable gap in writing within theapocalyptic tradition. It is engagingly written, extensive in its choice of texts and,throughout, the textual analysis is in productive dialogue with critical theory.Repeatedly, we learn how the fiction of elsewhere and the fiction of the futureurgently speak to our here and now.’— Mary Eagleton, author of Clever Girls and the Literature of Women’s UpwardMobility (2018)
This book examines how contemporary women novelists have successfullytransformed and rewritten the conventions of post-apocalyptic fiction. Since thedawn of the new millennium, there has been an outpouring of writing that depictsthe end of the world as we know it, and women writers are no exception to thistrend. However, the book argues that their fiction is distinctive. Contemporarywomen’s work in this genre avoids conservatism, a nostalgic mourning for thepast, and the focus on restoring what has been lost, aspects key to much maleauthoredapocalyptic fiction. Instead, contemporary women writers show readersthe ways in which patriarchy and neo-colonialism are intrinsically implicated inthe disasters they envision, and offer qualified hope for a new beginning forsociety, culture and literature after an imagined apocalyptic event. Exploringscience, nature and matter, the posthuman body, the maternal imaginary, time,narrative and history, literature and the word, and the post-secular, the bookcovers a wide variety of writers and addresses issues of nationality, race andethnicity, as well as gender and sexuality.
Susan Watkins is a Professor of Women’s Writing at Leeds Beckett University.Her key publications include Twentieth-Century Women Novelists: Feminist Theoryinto Practice (2001), Doris Lessing (2010) and (as co-editor) Scandalous Fictions:The Twentieth-Century Novel in the Public Sphere (2006), Doris Lessing: BorderCrossings (2009) and The History of British Women’s Writing Vol 9: 1945–1975(2017).