Description
A growing awareness of climate change and looming planetary crisis has put unprecedented pressure on the near future, leading to an increasing amount of fiction being set there. But what do these disparate works have in common, other than their temporal setting? And what can the imagination of the near future tell us about where we live now? The Near Future in 21st Century Fiction ranges across novels and films to reveal how our contemporary near future splits between two divergent paths. One seeks to retreat from climate change and the disruption it threatens to affluent lifestyles; the other tries to imagine new forms of community, and radical change, but struggles to locate a genre adequate to the task. It in this struggle, however, that we begin to glimpse the outlines of an emergent near future form: a revolution fit for the Anthropocene.
Explores contemporary fiction set in the near future to shed new light on our culture's relationship to the Anthropocene.
About the Author
David Sergeant is Associate Professor in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature at the University of Plymouth. He is the author of a monograph on Rudyard Kipling, three poetry collections, and essays in journals including Novel, Genre, and Twentieth-Century Literature. He is co-editor of volumes on Robert Burns and Doris Lessing.
Reviews
'David Sergeant works carefully through his chosen texts and key textual evidence to draw conclusions about their ideological commitments. The analyses here can be brilliant; what he manages to pull out of these texts is revelatory.' Amy J. Elias, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville
'David Sergeant's Fictions of the Near Future makes a crucial intervention in scholarship on utopian fiction, speculative fiction, and climate change fiction by demonstrating the contemporary political relevance of the near future as it appears in novels across a range of genres and styles' Rachel Greenwald Smith, Saint Louis University
'... this study is most impressive in the way that it combines granular close readings with a form of "distant reading", allowing speculative fiction's broad patterns to emerge alongside its finer details.' Arin Keeble, The Times Literary Supplement
Book Information
ISBN 9781009279888
Author David Sergeant
Format Hardback
Page Count 280
Imprint Cambridge University Press
Publisher Cambridge University Press
Weight(grams) 510g
Dimensions(mm) 235mm * 158mm * 20mm
Explores contemporary fiction set in the near future to shed new light on our culture's relationship to the Anthropocene.
About the Author
David Sergeant is Associate Professor in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature at the University of Plymouth. He is the author of a monograph on Rudyard Kipling, three poetry collections, and essays in journals including Novel, Genre, and Twentieth-Century Literature. He is co-editor of volumes on Robert Burns and Doris Lessing.
Reviews
'David Sergeant works carefully through his chosen texts and key textual evidence to draw conclusions about their ideological commitments. The analyses here can be brilliant; what he manages to pull out of these texts is revelatory.' Amy J. Elias, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville
'David Sergeant's Fictions of the Near Future makes a crucial intervention in scholarship on utopian fiction, speculative fiction, and climate change fiction by demonstrating the contemporary political relevance of the near future as it appears in novels across a range of genres and styles' Rachel Greenwald Smith, Saint Louis University
'... this study is most impressive in the way that it combines granular close readings with a form of "distant reading", allowing speculative fiction's broad patterns to emerge alongside its finer details.' Arin Keeble, The Times Literary Supplement
Book Information
ISBN 9781009279888
Author David Sergeant
Format Hardback
Page Count 280
Imprint Cambridge University Press
Publisher Cambridge University Press
Weight(grams) 510g
Dimensions(mm) 235mm * 158mm * 20mm
