Post-Apocalyptic Novel in the Twenty-First Century

Heather J. Hicks is Associate Professor of English at Villanova University, USA. She is author of The Culture of Soft Work: Labor, Gender and Race in Postmodern American Narrative and has published in several journals including Postmodern Culture, Arizona Quarterly, Camera Obscura, and Contemporary Literature.

“Hicks survey is potentially overwhelming. One can readily sympathize with these critics’ leeriness towards tidy solutions to such massive and systemic dangers.” (Derek C. Maus, Orbit, Vol. 7 (1), 2019)“This is a book about the decline of the nation-state, the different ways to understand time, the many potential faces of human slavery, the evolving aesthetic of the sublime, the muddled balance sheet of postmodernism and dehumanizing labor, the power of language, the threat of human ignorance, and the seeming omnipresence of war. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above.” (P. L. Redditt, Choice, Vol. 54 (4), December, 2016)

• Introduction: Beyond Salvage1. The Mother of All Apocalypses in Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake2. 'This Time Round': David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and the Apocalyptic Problem of Historicism3. Friday at the End of the World: Apocalyptic Change and the Legacy of Robinson Crusoe in Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods4. 'Stop! Can You Hear the Eagle Roar?': Zombie Kitsch and the Apocalyptic Sublime in Colson Whitehead's Zone One5. 'The Raw Materials': Petromodernity, Retromodernity and the Bildungsroman in Paolo Bacigalupi's Ship BreakerConclusion