1st Edition
Utopian and Dystopian Explorations of Pandemics and Ecological Breakdown Entangled Futurities
This edited collection, which is situated within the environmental humanities and environmental social sciences, brings together utopian and dystopian representations of pandemics from across literature, the arts, and social movements.
Featuring analyses of literary works, TV and film, theater, politics, and activism, the chapters in this volume home in on critical topics such as posthumanism, multispecies futures, agency, political ecology, environmental justice, and Indigenous and settler-colonial environmental relations. The book asks: how do pandemics and ecological breakdown show us the ways that humans are deeply interconnected with the more-than-human world? And what might we learn from exploring those entanglements, both within creative works and in lived reality? Brazilian, Indian, Polish, and Dutch texts feature alongside classic literary works like Defoe’s A Journal of a Plague Year (1722) and Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954), as well as broader takes on movements like global youth climate activism. These investigations are united by their thematic interests in the future of human and nonhuman relationships in the shadow of climate emergency and increasing pandemic risk, as well as in the glimmers of utopian hope they exhibit for the creation of more just futures.
This exploration of how pandemics illuminate the entangled materialities and shared vulnerabilities of all living things is an engaging and timely analysis that will appeal to environmentally minded researchers, academics, and students across various disciplines within the humanities and social sciences.
Introduction: Entangled Futurities
Heather Alberro, Emrah Atasoy, Nora Castle, Rhiannon Firth, and Conrad Scott
Part 1: Monsters and Monstrosity
1. “In the woods the Tox is still wild”: The EcoGothic in Rory Power’s Wilder Girls
Tânia Cerqueira
2. The Human/Un(human): Monster, Ecophobia, and the Posthuman Horror(scape) in Dibakar Banerjee’s “Monster,” Ghost Stories
Ujjwal Khobra and Rashmi Gaur
3. A Scourge Even Worse Than Disease: Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend as Pandemic Political Allegory
Timothy S. Murphy
Part 2: Intersectional Critique
4. Fungal Imaginaries: The Reconfiguration of Post-Pandemic Society in Severance (2018) and The Last of Us (2023)
Matthew Leggatt
5. Five Hundred Years of Plague: Indigenous Apocalypse in Joca Reiners Terron’s Death and the Meteor (2019)
Benjamin Burt
6. Corruption and Cleansing: An Eco-Feminist Approach to the Nature/Culture Dichotomy in Naomi Novik’s Uprooted
Sara González Bernárdez
7. Through Currents of Contamination: The Failure of Immunizing Insularity in Sophie Mackintosh’s The Water Cure
Eleonora Rossi
Part 3: More-Than-Human Mutual Aid and Eco-Justice
8. Dystopian Prohibitions and Utopian Possibilities in Edmonton, Canada, at the Onset of the COVID-19 Pandemic
Rylan Kafara
9. Affiliation as Environmental Justice in Three Climate Novels
Claire P. Curtis
10. “A Vortex of Summons and Repulsion”: The Productive Abject, Posthumanisms, and the Weird in Charles Burns’ Black Hole (2005)
Alice Seville, Benjamin Horn, and Jayde Martin
11. (Un)Caring Borders: More-than-Human Solidarities in the Białowieża Forest
Hanna Grześkiewicz and Marleen Boschen
Part 4: Creative Resistance and Utopian Glimmers
12. “Preservation is an Action, not a State”: DIY Utopian Enclaves and Ways Out of Post-Pandemic Surveillance Capitalism in Sarah Pinsker’s A Song for a New Day
Jari Käkelä
13. Pandemic Dramaturgy: Co-Designing the Performance Dying Together/Futures with the COVID-19 Virus
Alice Breemen
14. Vitality of Non-Human Entities: Plagues and Pandemics as Hyperobjects in Defoe, Camus, and Pamuk
Hülya Yağcıoğlu
15. World-Building Enactments of The School Strike Movements During the Pandemic: Reading Youth Climate Crisis Movements Through a Micro and Nano-Utopian Lens
Heather McKnight
Biography
Heather Alberro is a Senior Lecturer in global sustainable development at Nottingham Trent University, in the Department of History, Heritage and Global Cultures. She also serves as co-convenor for the Political Studies Association's (PSA) environmental politics specialist group, and as a member of the PSA's Executive Committee.
Emrah Atasoy, an Associate Professor of English, is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow (EUTOPIA-SIF COFUND) of the Institute of Advanced Study (IAS), working in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, UK.
Nora Castle is currently an independent scholar. She received her PhD in 2023 from the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, UK, where she also completed an Early Career Fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Study.
Rhiannon Firth is a Lecturer in Sociology of Education at IoE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society. She co-leads the MA modules Sociology of Education and Gender, Sexuality and Education, and is Programme Leader for the MA Sociology of Education.
Conrad Scott holds a PhD from and is an Associate Lecturer in the University of Alberta’s Department of English and Film Studies, on Treaty 6 / Métis lands, and is an Individualized Study Tutor for the University of Athabasca’s Honours English course on “The Ecological Imagination,” where he holds a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship.
“Fully globalized, immediately connected, yet still radically unequal in resources and protections, humanity has now become aware of itself as a species in a new, more urgent way: when pathogens and environmental disruptions strike, how can past experiences and their representations provide perspective, balance, and hope? This book provides answers.”
James Engell, Gurney Professor of English and Professor of Comparative Literature, Harvard University, USA
“This book is a collection of diverse and passionately engaged explorations of the way we live now. It is imbued both with a sense of the traumas of (post)apocalypse and a hope that human and non-human species can find ways to survive into futures that are not simply continuations of a present scarred by pandemics, extinctions, and the eco-injustices of global capital. The essays here are international in scope, multiplex in their critical methodologies, and comprehensive in their coverage. They provide resources for thinking about how to move into futures in which, through this "breakdown," we take our non-anthropocentric place as one of the many species co-existing in an ecosystem that encompasses all life on the planet.”
Veronica Hollinger, Editor, Science Fiction Studies, and Professor Emerita of Cultural Studies, Trent University, Canada
“As the introduction describes, this timely book emerged out of a dark and precarious contemporary moment, in the world and in the field of utopian studies. By bringing together this collection of cutting-edge studies by such a diverse mix of scholars addressing one of the most disruptive and destructive events of recent times, the editors have delivered an insightful and impactful counterpoint to official and normative invitations to despair and capitulate. This volume is itself an act of utopian annunciation in the face of official denunciation. Read it, hope, and act.”
Tom Moylan, Professor Emeritus in the School of English, Irish, and Communication, and member of the Ralahine Centre for Utopian Studies, University of Limerick, Ireland
