Utopian and Dystopian Explorations of Pandemics and Ecological Breakdown : : Entangled Futurities.

• Author: Alberro, Heather.
• TeilnehmendeR: Atasoy, Emrah.; Castle, Nora.; Firth, Rhiannon.; Scott, Conrad.
• Place / Publishing House: Oxford : : Taylor & Francis Group,, 2024.; ©2025.
• Year of Publication: 2024
• Edition: 1st ed.
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (255 pages)

"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"-- Provided by publisher.

Table of Contents

Cover -- Endorsements Page -- Half Title -- Series Page -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- Editor Bios -- Contributor Bios -- Introduction: Entangled Futurities -- Part 1 Monsters and Monstrosity -- 1 "In the Woods the Tox is Still Wild": The EcoGothic in Rory Power's Wilder Girls -- 2 The Human/Un(human): Monster, Ecophobia, and the Posthuman Horror(scape) in Dibakar Banerjee's "Monster," Ghost Stories -- 3 A Scourge Even Worse Than Disease: Richard Matheson's I Am Legend as Pandemic Political Allegory -- Part 2 Intersectional Critique -- 4 Fungal Imaginaries: The Reconfiguration of Post-Pandemic Society in Severance and The Last of Us -- 5 Five Hundred Years of Plague: Indigenous Apocalypse in Joca Reiners Terron's Death and the Meteor -- 6 Corruption and Cleansing: An Eco-Feminist Approach to the Nature/Culture Dichotomy in Naomi Novik's Uprooted -- 7 Through Currents of Contamination: The Failure of Immunizing Insularity in Sophie Mackintosh's The Water Cure -- 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 -- 9 Affiliation as Environmental Justice in Three Climate Novels -- 10 "A vortex of Summons and Repulsion": The Productive Abject, Posthumanisms, and the Weird in Charles Burns' Black Hole -- 11 (Un)Caring Borders: More-Than-Human Solidarities in the Bialowieza Forest -- 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 -- 13 Pandemic Dramaturgy: Co-Designing the Performance Dying Together/Futures with COVID-19 -- 14 Vitality of Nonhuman Entities: Plagues and Pandemics as Hyperobjects in Defoe, Camus, and Pamuk.

15 World-Building Enactments of the School Strike Movements during the Pandemic: Reading Youth Climate Crisis Movements through a Micro-and Nano-Utopian Lens -- Index.