The contemporary moment is characterized by precarity – an expanding and intensifying vulnerability conditioned by political and economic structures. Using literary and cultural texts to develop a nuanced and critical exploration of the concept of precarity that emphasizes its contemporary manifestations while also attending to its historical roots and existential dimensions, this book examines the vulnerabilities which characterize our anxious existence, including unemployment, environmental crisis, temporary contracts and patterns of migration. Broken down into three key themes of feelings, bodies and time, Precarity in Contemporary Literature and Culture asks whether precarity can be considered a new phenomenon; explores the relationship between precarity and traditional class politics; analyses precarity’s global dimensions; and reflects on the links between contemporary crisis and underlying existential human vulnerability. With reference to a wide range of forms such as contemporary, realist, science fiction and modernist novels, film, theatre, and the lyric poem, this book goes beyond one national context to consider texts from the US, UK, Germany and South Africa.
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List of figuresList of contributors Acknowledgements IntroductionPart One: FeelingChapter 1 – Anxious reading: the precarity novel and the affective class – Liam Connell, University of Brighton, UKChapter 2 – Anxiety in the precariat: The affects of class in James Kelman’s fiction – Mathies G. Aarhus, University of Southern DenmarkChapter 3 – Performing precarity: threatening the audience in Gary Owen’s Iphigenia in Splott – Peter Simonsen, University of Southern DenmarkPart Two: BodiesChapter 4 – Imagined sovereignty: mapping and resisting precarity in Indira Allegra’s Woven Account – Marianne Kongerslev, Aalborg University, DenmarkChapter 5 – Precarious Bodies on the Move, Precarious Bodies Under Attack – Katharina Pewny, previously Ghent University, Belgium and Tessa Vannieuwenhuyze, doctoral researcherChapter 6 – Death knells and dead ends: Latent futurity in Masande Ntshanga’s The Reactive and Mohale Mashigo’s ‘Ghost Strain N’ – Sophy Kohler, University of Southern DenmarkPart Three: TimeChapter 7 – Periodization and precarious labour: the work of genre in La La Land and Sorry to Bother You’ – Alissa G. Karl, State University of New York, Brockport, USAChapter 8 - Substanceless Subjectivity: From Proletarianization to Precarization in British Experimental Fiction – Benjamin Kohlmann, University of Regensburg, GermanyChapter 9 - The Future is a Ghost’: Precarity, Anticipation and Retrospection in Anneliese Mackintosh’s ‘Limited Dreamers’ and Lee Rourke’s Vulgar Things – Emily J. Hogg, University of Southern DenmarkChapter 10 – ‘Make it Now’: poetry, precarity, and security in Jorie Graham and Ghayath Almadhoun – Walt Hunter, Clemson University, USAChapter 11 - Finding time in common: speculative fiction and the precariat in Robinson’s New York 2140 – Bryan Yazell, University of Southern DenmarkIndex
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Precarity in Contemporary Literature and Culture is an original and impressive collection of thoughtfully argued essays. Using a common language drawn from recent theories of precarity and precaritization, the contributors explore themes of risk, uncertainty, and vulnerability across a broad array of genres that include fiction, poetry, film, and theatre. The collection offers a searing indictment of the ravages of neoliberalism, and it thinks creatively about how aesthetic experimentation can make these ravages evident and, potentially, remediable.
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An exploration of the diverse ways in which different genres of literary and cultural production illuminate and clarify the concept of precarity.
Intervenes in the latest theoretical debates about the meaning and value of precarity, by showing what literary and cultural forms from fiction and poetry to film and drama can contribute to the theorisation of the concept.
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Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9781350235311
Publisert
2022-11-17
Utgiver
Vendor
Bloomsbury Academic
Høyde
234 mm
Bredde
156 mm
Aldersnivå
U, 05
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Heftet
Antall sider
224

Om bidragsyterne

Peter Simonsen is Professor of European literature in the Department for the Study of Culture at the University of Southern Denmark. He is the author of Wordsworth and Word-Preserving Arts (2007) and several related articles on Romanticism, ekphrasis and textual materiality. In 2014 he published (in Danish) Lifelong Lives, a study of fiction about old age and the welfare state. Peter was co-editor of Literature: An Introduction to Theory and Analysis published by Bloomsbury in 2017.

Emily J. Hogg is Associate Professor in the Department for the Study of Culture at the University of Southern Denmark. She has contributed to many journals and books including Textual Practice, English Studies, The Social History of Alcohol and Drugs: An Interdisciplinary Journal, The Routledge Companion to Twenty First Century Literary Fiction, edited by Robert Eaglestone and Daniel O’Gorman (2019), and New Feminist Studies: Twenty-First Century Critical Interventions, edited by Jennifer Cooke (2020).