Narratives of Hope and Despair

Ruin and Regeneration in Literature and Culture

Johanna M. Wagner, Melanie Duckworth, Deanna Benjamin (Herausgeber)

Buch | Hardcover

226 Seiten

2025
Routledge (Verlag)
978-1-041-10758-3 (ISBN)

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In narratives of literature and cultural production, hope and despair remain fundamental in exploring our world. In recent years, political polarization, the Covid pandemic, global warming, and new and ongoing wars have contributed to global crises, to which despair is an understandable response. Yet hope is continually sought and proclaimed. By examining tropes of ruin and regeneration in a wide selection of narratives including memoir, graphic narratives, fiction, film, art, radio plays, culture, rhetoric, and discourse, the book uncovers resonances between them. The anthology moves from the personal to the collective, addressing individual matters of the body and the mind, societal visions of utopia and dystopia, and, finally, hope and despair for the earth itself in representations of apocalypse and the Anthropocene. This structure, alongside the interdisciplinary nature of the project, maps dynamic international perspectives in which hope and despair flow across and through personal, social, and earthly concerns.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

Johanna M. Wagner is Professor of English at Østfold University College in Norway. She publishes in American and British literature, women’s literature, modernism, and film. Her theoretical interests lie at the intersections of gender/sexuality, feminism, affect, critical race theory, and metaphysics. Her last co-edited project was Women and Fairness (2021). Melanie Duckworth is Associate professor of English Literature at Østfold University College, Norway. She publishes in the fields of children’s literature, Australian literature, and ecocriticism. Her most recent co-edited volume is Storying Plants in Australian Children’s and Young Adult Literature: Roots and Winged Seeds (2023). Deanna Benjamin teaches college and creative writing at Washington University in St. Louis, USA. Her creative work can be read in Thimble Literature Magazine, MacQueen’s Quinterly Review, The Texas Review, Flash Boulevard, and other venues. Her critical essay “Writing Someone Else’s Story” appears in Women and Fairness (2021).

List of Contributors

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Johanna M. Wagner, Melanie Duckworth, Deanna Benjamin

I Individual Matters: Body and Mind

1 “Common but not normal”: The Narrative of Illness in Duermo mucho [I Sleep a Lot], by Maria Manonelles Ribes

Wladimir Chávez

2 Hope and Despair in the Grey Zone: Unlikely Solidarities and Friendships in Negotiating Prolonged Incarceration in Sri Lanka’s Political Prisons

Vihanga Perera

3 Spacetime, Tone, and the Sublime: Hope and Despair in Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood

Johanna M. Wagner

4 Pessimistic Hope as Rebellion: Fassbinder’s Despair and Utopia

Anna Bell

II Societal Matters: Utopian and Dystopian Impulses

5 Trauma Memoir as Dystopian Literature

Deanna Benjamin

6 Climbing Mt. Holyoke: Emily Dickinson, Mary Lyon, and Woman-Centered Utopias

Aliki Barnstone

7 “Falling Out of the Story”: Asian American Archives, Cruel Optimism, and Emancipatory Apparatuses in Sally Wen Mao’s Oculus and Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown

Paul Petrovic

8 “End. Begin. All the same…”: The Ends (And Beginnings) of Worlds in Netflix’s The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance

Miranda Liebel

9 At the End of History: Art Practices in Times and Spaces of Modern Ruination

Dimitra Gkitsa

III Earthly Matters: Apocalypse and the Anthropocene

10 Norwegian Futurisms: Energy Transitions in Young Adult Ecodystopian Fiction

Karl Kristian Swane Bambini

11 Animal Voices in the Apocalypse: The Animals in That Country and The Ghost of the Cock

Melanie Duckworth

12 The Ruins of Holocene: Notes on Climate Change and the Rise of Disaster Liberalism

Iason Zarikos

13 Optimistic vs Ominous: Competing Rhetorics of Ecological Crisis

John Farnsworth

Index

Erscheinungsdatum	16.10.2025
Reihe/Serie	Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature
Zusatzinfo	4 Halftones, black and white; 4 Illustrations, black and white
Verlagsort	London
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Gewicht	600 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Psychologie ► Psychoanalyse / Tiefenpsychologie
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
	Medizin / Pharmazie ► Medizinische Fachgebiete ► Psychiatrie / Psychotherapie
ISBN-10	1-041-10758-7 / 1041107587
ISBN-13	978-1-041-10758-3 / 9781041107583
Zustand	Neuware