Narratives of Hope and Despair Ruin and Regeneration in Literature and Culture

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 Eco-Dystopian 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  Ruins of the Holocene: Notes on Climate Change and the Rise of Disaster Liberalism

Iason Zarikos

13  Optimistic versus Ominous: Competing Rhetorics of Ecological Crisis

John Seibert Farnsworth

Index

Biography

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).

Narratives of Hope and Despair: Ruin and Regeneration in Literature and Culture brings together a rich and diverse collection of voices from across the global scholarly community to explore the various and varied ways in which narrative produces and is produced by the lived, felt experiences of hope and despair. The thirteen chapters that comprise the body of this volume engage myriad genres—from the novel to the graphic novel to film to the radio play to memoir and autobiography, to name only a few—in the quest to rigorously interrogate and thoughtfully articulate “how we create and handle hope and despair, ruin and rejuvenation, in narratives of critical moments and times.” The result is a meticulously researched, highly original, and compelling volume that will be a welcome addition to the bookshelves of academics who represent many fields from across the arts and humanities.

 Heath A. Diehl, Teaching Professor, Bowling Green State University, USA