1st Edition
Temporalities in/of Crises in Anglophone Literatures
Literary works play a crucial role in modelling and conceptualising temporalities. This becomes particularly apparent in times of crises, which put conventionalised temporal patterns and routines under pressure. During crises, past, present, and future appear to collapse into each other and give way to temporal disjunction and rupture. Offering pluralised and context-sensitive approaches to temporalities in and of crises, this volume explores how literature’s engagement with crises suggests both the need for and possibility of rethinking ‘time’. The volume is committed to examining the affordances of specific genres and their potential in pointing beyond temporalities of crises to facilitate a sense of futurity. Individual essays are grounded in recent theories of temporality and literary form, which are related to novel advancements in ecocriticism, queer studies, affect theory, and postcolonial studies. The chapters cover a broad range of examples from different literary genres to reveal the knowledge of literature about temporalities in and of crises.
List of Figures
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
- Whose Temporalities? Which Crises? Temporalities in and of Crises in Anglophone Literatures (Sibylle Baumbach and Birgit Neumann)
- Time of the Seasons: Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet as Crisis Literature (Dirk Wiemann)
- Temporalising the Troubles: Anna Burns’s Milkman (Raphael Zähringer)
- The Entangled Times of COVID, Climate, and Race in the US: Reading the "Heterotemporality" of Colson Whitehead’s Zone One (Rick Crownshaw)
- Shakespeare, Auerbach, Vladislavić: Figural Readings and Temporalities of Crisis in Johannesburg (Russell West-Pavlov)
- Forms of Futurity: The Entangled Temporalities of Eco-terror in the Niger Delta (Amanda Lagji)
- "I Do I Did I Think I Thought": Temporal Contiguities of Pregnancy and the Ecological Crisis (Leila Michelle Vaziri)
- Lerner’s Lists: The Novel and the Time of Living (Arne De Boever)
- ‘Corked up in Cages’: Crisis, Control, and Communication in Waiting-Room Poetry (Christoph Singer)
- The Physics of Ravicka: Queer Temporalities of Renee Gladman’s Quadrilogy (E. L. McCallum)
- The Scale of Time: Literary Figurations of Nuclear Temporalities (Gabriele Schwab)
- Crisis Time and Rereading (Ben Davies, Christina Lupton, and Johanne Gormsen Schmidt)
Index
Biography
Sibylle Baumbach is Professor of English Literature and Culture at the University of Stuttgart (Germany). She is the author of Literature and Fascination (2015) and co-editor of several volumes and special issues, including Narratives Between Attention and Mind-Wandering (2022), Victorian Surfaces (2021), New Approaches to the 21st-century Anglophone Novel (2021), and Brexit and Academia (2021).
Birgit Neumann is Professor of Anglophone Literatures and Translation Studies at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (Germany). Recent publications include Verbal-Visual Configurations in Postcolonial Literatures (2020, with Gabriele Rippl), as well as the edited and co-edited volumes Anglophone World Literatures (2017), Global Literary Histories (2018), New Approaches to the 21st-century Anglophone Novel (2021), and Handbook of Anglophone World Literatures (2021).
