Description
Book SynopsisA history and examination of dystopia and angst in popular culture that speaks to our current climate of dread.
At the dawn of the 20th century, a wide-ranging utopianism dominated popular and intellectual cultures throughout Europe and America. However, in the aftermathof the World Wars, with such canonical examples as Brave New World and Nineteen-Eighty-Four, dystopia emerged as a dominant genre, in literature and in social thought. The continuing presence and eventual dominance of dystopian themes in popular culturee.g., dismal authoritarian future states, sinister global conspiracies, post-apocalyptic landscapes, a proliferation of horrific monsters, and end-of-the-world fantasieshave confirmed the degree to which the 21st is also a dystopian century.
Drawing on literature as varied as H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, Neil Gaiman's American Gods, and Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games, and on TV and film such as The
Trade Review
What better guide could there be than the ever-incisive Tally to this brave new world of gods, monsters, dystopias, apocalypses, tattered maps, gold-bearing rubble, and, well, monsters? Welcome to the Teratocene! * Mark Bould, Professor of Film and Literature, UWE Bristol, UK, and author of The Anthropocene Unconscious: Climate Catastrophe Culture (2021) *
From Neil Gaiman and NAFTA to panoptic surveillance in Black Mirror, and from monsters in children's literature to the post-apocalyptic landscapes of modern cinema, Robert T. Tally Jr. in The Fiction of Dread diagnoses the morbid symptoms of contemporary narrative preoccupations. Through attention to dystopian themes, multiplying monsters, and the end of the world, Tally presents a wide-ranging, clearly written, and extremely insightful analysis of the appeal of dreadful things and the kind of critical work they do in helping us attempt to grasp the complexities of our world and imagine other, better possibilities. * Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, Professor of English, Central Michigan University, USA *
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements Introduction: Monstrous Accumulation 1. Evoking Dread: The Reality of Possibility 2. Baleful Continuities; or, the Desire Called Dystopia 3. Lost in Grand Central: American Gods, Free Trade, and Globalization 4. The Utopia of the Mirror: The Postmodern Mise en abyme 5. Welcome to the Teratocene: Morbid Symptoms at the Present Conjuncture 6. Teratology as Ideology Critique; or, a Monster Under Every Bed 7. The End-of-the-World as World System 8. In the Deserts of the Empire: The Map, the Territory, and the Heterotopian Enclave Conclusion: Gold-Bearing Rubble Bibliography Index
