1st Edition

Connie Willis’s Science Fiction Doomsday Every Day

Edited By Carissa Turner Smith Copyright 2023
292 Pages
by Routledge

292 Pages
by Routledge

292 Pages
by Routledge

In spite of Connie Willis’s numerous science fiction awards and her groundbreaking history as a woman in the field, there is a surprising dearth of critical publication surrounding her work. Taking Doomsday Book as its cue, this collection argues that Connie Willis’s most famous novel, along with the rest of her oeuvre, performs science fiction’s task of cognitive estrangement by highlighting... Read more

Introduction

PART I: Contagion

Chapter One: All This Has Happened Before, and All This Will Happen Again: Doomsday Book and Recurring Pandemics

Joelle L. Renstrom

Chapter Two: Flip Passes: Interpreting Agency and Contagion in Bellwether

Jill Marie Treftz

PART II: Individual and Collective Trauma

Chapter Three: Emergency Unpreparedness: Responses to Disaster in Connie Willis’s Passage Matthew Newcomb

Chapter Four: Taking it Personally: Private Engagement with Public Trauma from World War II to J.F.K.

Janet L. Bland

PART III: Incarnation and Embodiment

Chapter Five: "You Were Here All Along": Doomsday Book and the Bodies of Christ

Chad Schrock

Chapter Six: Christmas Every Day: Incarnational Theology in Connie Willis’s "Inn" and "Epiphany"

Erin Newcomb

PART IV: Intertextuality

Chapter Seven: Bell Speech in John Donne, Richard Wilbur, and Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book

William Tate

Chapter Eight: Finding Love (and Truth?) in the Midst of Chaos: The Influence of Dorothy L. Sayers’s Detective Fiction on To Say Nothing of the Dog

Christine A. Colón

PART V: Genre, Gender, and Xenophobia

Chapter Nine: The Mote in the Jester’s Eye: Aspects of Race and Gender in Connie Willis’s Light Short Fiction

Sylvia Kelso

Chapter Ten: "Tell All the Truth but Tell it Slant": Rhetorical Humor in Connie Willis’s Short Fiction

Rosalyn Eves

PART VI: Humanist and Posthumanist Witness

Chapter Eleven: Messages in a Bottle: The Historian’s Ethic in Connie Willis’s Quantum Universe

Kathryn N. McDaniel

Chapter Twelve: Schrödinger’s Cathedrals: Humanist Memory and Posthumanist Sacramentality in Connie Willis’s Fiction

Carissa Turner Smith

Biography

Carissa Turner Smith is Professor of English and Writing Center Director at Charleston Southern University, where she teaches American literature. Her book Cyborg Saints: Religion and Posthumanism in Middle Grade and Young Adult Fiction was published by Routledge in 2020.