The Routledge Companion to Literatures and Crisis

List of Contributors

Introduction: Literature and crises across historical scales

Julia Kuznetski, Chiara Battisti, Silvia Pellicer-Ortin

PART I – ADDRESSING CRISES THROUGH LITERATURE

I.I Theoretical approaches to crises

1. What matters: Literature’s importance in times of crisis

Jean Michel Ganteau

2. The ethics and value of literature in times of crisis

Susana Onega

3. Whose crisis? Framing 9/11 and the “war on terror”

Michael C. Frank

4. Migration crisis in contemporary literature: A complicated journey through loss and hope.

Merve Sarıkaya-Şen

5. War, migration and human rights: Strategies of voicing in contemporary fiction

Sue Vice

6. Care crisis

Lisa Baraitser and Laura Salisbury

7.Climate crisis and literature: Towards propositive narratives.

Gala Arias Rubio

I.II Literary genres and crises

8. Physical and spiritual crises in mediaeval and early English Renaissance drama.

Paul Majkut

9. Lines of exposure: Poetry and crisis

Charles Ivan Armstrong

10. Life-writing practices: A way out of crisis?

Silvia Pellicer-Ortin

11. Too burning for fiction? Women writing non-fiction in times of crisis

Julia Kuznetski

12. The resilient frame: Graphic narratives and crises representation.

Chiara Battisti

13. Ecosystems of Change in the Baltics: Decoloniality and storytelling in art.

Ieva Astahovska.  

14.‘When it changed’: Crisis in science fiction and speculative literature.

Raphael Kabo

PART II - CRISES IN LITERATURES ACROSS THE WORLD

II.I Political and ideological crises in a historical perspective

15. Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini: literature as the art of mediation

Fabio Forner

16. “Fair Sequence and Succession”: Shakespeare and the Elizabethan succession crisis

Harvey Wiltshire

17. The Devil in disguise: Writing the witch in Jacobean law and literature

Ian Ward

18. Annus mirabilis and the rhyming of history

Paul Majkut

19. This is not a crisis. The ideological construction of crises (Sweden)

Leif Dahlberg

20. The Crisis of polarisation: The example of Jonathan Coe

Robert Eaglestone

II.II War, migration and violence

21. The inexhaustible human vectors: war, crisis, literature—from Beowulf to Ian McEwan

Eva María Pérez Rodríguez

22. Identity struggles and domestic turmoil in Ayşe Kulin’s Tutsak Güneş

Emrah Atasoy

23. The crisis of humanism, the Holocaust, and “The Jewish Dog” as a de/re-humanising figure in French literature.

Helena Duffy

24. Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast (2021): A tool of hermeneutical justice?

Cecilia Beecher Martins

25. Poetry as an anthropological trailblazer in situation of crisis: Russophone poets’ answer Russia’s aggression against Ukraine and catastrophic transformation of the political regime (2022—2024)

Ilya Kukulin

26. The year war did not begin: Representations of war in Estonian literature

Piret Viires

II.III Values and identity crises

27. One man’s dystopia is another woman’s utopia: Humanity revolutionised according to Stanisława Przybyszewska

Ksenia Shmydkaya

28. Experiences, learning and consequences of the pandemic: a critical eye at Spanish literature through the text of Marta Sanz

Noelia Núñez Preza

29. Ukrainian literary imaginaries of the past after 1991: From substitution to restoration?

Alexander Dmitriev

30. Liminal states of consciousness and crises of affect in contemporary Chinese literature

Ivan Stacy

31.Transitory identities and heterotopic spaces of crisis in the narratives of contemporary Brazilian women writers

Izabel Brandão

32. Crises down under: An approach to values and identity in contemporary Australian writing

Bárbara Arizti

33. Epic voices from Africa: Historical de-colonial re-writings

Eugenia Ossana

II.IV. Environmental crises and biopolitics

34. “Art in crisis”: The novel in the age of digital media and global change

Markku Lehtimäki

35. Biopolitics and crisis in South Asian literary representations of midwifery and surrogacy

Antonia Navarro Tejero

36.Transecology repairs the capitalist metabolic rift? A reading of Chôsansei [Birth conscription] by Japanese novelist Tanaka Chôko

Keitaro Morita

II.V Technological crises and Posthumanism

37. Technological crisis and posthumanity in Chinese philosophy and literature

Amy Chan Kit-Sze

38. Crisis, in extremis: Posthuman vulnerability in Jean-Baptiste Francois Xavier Cousin de Grainville’s The Last Man

Ivan Callus

39. “If you are a man Winston, you are the last man:” Social crisis and the wounded storyteller in the dystopian universe of George Orwell’s Nineteen eighty-four

Sidia Fiorato

40. Transhumanism and posthumanism: The enhancement or the end of the human?

Daniela Carpi

41. Literature at the crossroad in digital age:  A case study at IULM University

Paola Carbone

42. The Pause Letter, the existential AI crisis and digital ideology

Anders Hedman

Index

Biography

Silvia Pellicer-Ortín is Associate Professor at the Department of English and German Philology in the Faculty of Education of the University of Zaragoza, Spain. She has co-edited several books, including Trauma Narratives and Herstory (with Sonya Andermahr; 2013) and Memory Frictions in Contemporary Literature (with María Jesús Martínez-Alfaro; 2017).

Julia Kuznetski is Professor of English at the School of Humanities of Tallinn University, Estonia. Her work includes Women on the Move: Body, Memory and Femininity in Present-Day Transnational Diasporic Writing (co-edited with Silvia Pellicer-Ortín; Routledge, 2019).

Chiara Battisti is an Associate Professor of Anglo‑American Languages and Literatures at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures of the University of Verona, Italy. Her publications include Tailoring Identities in Victorian Literature (2023) and Islands in Geography, Law, and Literature (co-edited with S. Fiorato, M. Nicolini, T. Perrin; 2022).