The Routledge Companion to Literatures and Crisis

The Routledge Companion to Literatures and Crisis provides deep insight into a complex and multi-layered phenomenon. The third decade of the twenty-first century is being marked by a polycrisis caused by various world crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, armed conflicts and climate change leading to economic, geopolitical, environmental, health and security crises.
Featuring 42 chapters, the collection examines crises through literary texts in relation to the environment, finance, migration and diaspora, war, human rights, values and identity, health, politics, terrorism and technology. It illuminates the many faces of the current permacrisis as well as the multifarious crises of the past and their representation in literatures across ages and cultures-from the Viking wars, Black Death in mediaeval Europe, technology in ancient China and the crisis of power in Elizabethan England to imperial biopower in nineteenth-century India, the genocides in the twentieth century, upsurge of domestic violence during the Covid lockdown in Spain and the development of AI.
The Companion connects diverse cultures, disciplines and academic traditions to show how and why literature, media and art can voice all types of crises across times. It will be a key resource for students and researchers in a broad range of areas including literature, film studies, narrative studies, cultural studies, international politics and ecocriticism.
Chapters: Chapter 6 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.

List of contents

List of Contributors
 
Introduction: Literature and crises across historical scales
Julia Kuznetski, Chiara Battisti and 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 Sarikaya Sen
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 I. Armstrong
10. Life-writing practices: A way out of crisis?
Silvia Pellicer Ortín
11. Too burning for fiction? Women writing nonfiction 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 rhetorical construction of an epistemic and ideological crisis (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 M. Pérez Rodríguez
22. Identity struggles and domestic turmoil in Ayse Kulin's Tutsak günes
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. Hermeneutical (in) justice and crisis: A case study of Belfast and the "Troubles"
Cecilia Beecher Martins
25. Poetry as an anthropological trailblazer in situations 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 Stanislawa 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 decolonial 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
MORITA Keitaro
 
 II.V Technological crises and posthumanism
37. Technological crisis and posthumanity in Chinese philosophy and literature
Chan Kit sze Amy
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

About the author

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).

Summary

The Routledge Companion to Literatures and Crisis provides insight into a complex phenomenon. The collection examines crises through literary texts in relation to the environment, finance, migration and diaspora, war, human rights, values and identity, health, politics, terrorism, and technology

Product details

• Assisted by: Chiara Battisti (Editor), Julia Kuznetski (Editor), Silvia Pellicer Ortin (Editor), Silvia Pellicer-Ortín (Editor)
• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 22.10.2024
• EAN: 9781032424644
• ISBN: 978-1-0-3242464-4
• No. of pages: 488
• Dimensions: 174 mm x 30 mm x 246 mm
• Weight: 1080 g
• Illustrations: 7 SW-Abb., 6 SW-Fotos, 1 SW-Zeichn.
• Series: Routledge Literature Companions
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; POLITICAL SCIENCE / General, LITERARY CRITICISM / Semiotics & Theory, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 20th Century, Politics & government, Politics and government, Literary studies: post-colonial literature, Literary theory, Literary studies: postcolonial literature