A reading of Blanchot's idea of the disaster in relation to contemporary fiction of the United Kingdom and Ireland A comprehensive examination of a central, but undefined, aspect of Maurice Blanchot's deeply influential thought, the disaster Sustains an argument for the importance of fiction for representing and comprehending catastrophic events Examines the complex relation between philosophy and fiction, suggesting a deeply reciprocal relation between artistic and philosophical responses to the disaster Blanchot, Ecology and Contemporary Fiction: The Thought of the Disaster delves into Maurice Blanchot's enigmatic, and deeply influential, notion of the disaster a term Blanchot famously refuses to define. By exploring the novels of Jon McGregor, Mike McCormack, David Mitchell, Jeannette Winterson and Maggie Gee, Jonathan Boulter suggests that we can think of literature, the space of the imagination, as the place where some conception (ethical, ecological, or ontological) of the disaster emerges. These novels, all in some ways about the disaster, just as they are inflected by the disaster, become the place where an understanding of critical events death, ecological catastrophe, pandemics is possible.

About the Author
Jonathan Boulter is Professor of English at Western University, London, Canada. His previous publications include Posthuman Space in Samuel Beckett's Short Prose (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), Parables of the Posthuman: Digital Realities, Gaming, and the Player Experience (Wayne State UP, 2015), Melancholy and the Archive: Trauma, History and Memory in the Contemporary Novel (Continuum, 2011), Samuel Beckett: A Guide for the Perplexed (Continuum, 2008), and Interpreting Narrative in the Novels of Samuel Beckett (University Press of Florida, 2001).


Book Information
ISBN 9781474499620
Author Jonathan Boulter
Format Hardback
Page Count 256
Imprint Edinburgh University Press
Publisher Edinburgh University Press