The Routledge Companion to Literatures and Crisis

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; Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and Memory Frictions in Contemporary Literature (with María Jesús Martínez-Alfaro; Palgrave Macmillan, 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 Associate Professor of English Literature at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures of the University of Verona, Italy. Her publications include Tailoring Identities in Victorian Literature (Frank and Timme, 2023), and Islands in Geography, Law, and Literature (co-edited with S. Fiorato, M. Nicolini, T. Perrin; De Gruyter, 2022).

Introduction: Literature and crises across historical scales

PART I – ADDRESSING CRISES THROUGH LITERATURE

I.I Theoretical approaches to crises

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

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

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.

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

6. Care crisis

7.Climate crisis and literature: Towards propositive narratives.

I.II Literary genres and crises

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

9. Lines of exposure: Poetry and crisis

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

11. Too burning for fiction? Women writers’ polemical essays in times of crisis.

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

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

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

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

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

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

18. Annus mirabilis and the rhyming of history

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

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

II.II War, migration and violence

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

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

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

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

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)

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

II.III Values and identity crises

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

II.IV. Environmental crises and biopolitics

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

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

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

II.V Technological crises and Posthumanism

37. Technological crisis and posthumanity in Chinese philosophy and literature

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

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

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

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

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

Index