The Rest Is Silence : Postmodern and Postcolonial Possibilities in Climate Change Fiction single work   criticism  
Issue Details: First known date: 2018... 2018 The Rest Is Silence : Postmodern and Postcolonial Possibilities in Climate Change Fiction
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'In this essay, I consider postmodernist tendencies in two recent climate change novels, Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013) and Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea (2014). While I hesitate to claim that these herald a distinct postmodern turn in climate change fiction, I argue that these novels’ postmodernist self-awareness constitutes a promising new direction for fiction in the Anthropocene. Displaying a postcolonial awareness and deploying the postmodernist strategies of metafiction and magical realism, the novels undermine the omniscience of third-person narrators and the reliability of focalizers in order simultaneously to destabilize realist, imperialist, and anthropocentric constructions of the world. Indeed, they not only question the dominance of master-narratives; they question domination per se. That is, in these novels, voice itself comes under suspicion as an anthropocentric fallacy.'  (Publication abstract)

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    y separately published work icon Studies in the Novel Special Issue: The Rising Tide of Climate Change Fiction vol. 50 no. 1 Spring 2018 14082831 2018 periodical issue

    'The call for papers for this collection on “The Rising Tide of Climate Change Fiction” arose from concerns about pessimistic assessments, in recent literary criticism, of the novel’s ability to meet the representational challenges posed by the pressing planetary problem of climate change. The contributions to this volume take issue with that pessimism and take stock of the novel’s capabilities.'  (Introduction)

         2018     pg. 26-42
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26-42 The Rest Is Silence : Postmodern and Postcolonial Possibilities in Climate Change Fictionsmall AustLit logo Studies in the Novel
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