"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"--

The widespread use of electronic communication at the dawn of the twenty-first century has created a global context for our interactions, transforming the ways we relate to the world and to one another. This critical introduction reads the fiction of the past decade as a response to our contemporary predicament – one that draws on new cultural and technological developments to challenge established notions of democracy, humanity, and national and global sovereignty. Peter Boxall traces formal and thematic similarities in the novels of contemporary writers including Don DeLillo, Margaret Atwood, J. M. Coetzee, Marilynne Robinson, Cormac McCarthy, W. G. Sebald and Philip Roth, as well as David Mitchell, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dave Eggers, Ali Smith, Amy Waldman and Roberto Bolaño. In doing so, Boxall maps new territory for scholars, students and interested readers of today's literature by exploring how these authors narrate shared cultural life in the new century.

This volume explores the most exciting trends in 21st century US fiction's genres, themes, and concepts.

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.

A theorization of how the bioeconomy and biotechnology remake 'life itself,' creating crises in ethics and governance.

This lively new volume of essays examines what happens now in 21st century fiction. Fresh theoretical approaches to writers such as Salman Rushdie, David Peace, Margaret Atwood, and Hilary Mantel, and identifications of 21st-century themes, tropes and styles combine to produce a timely critical intervention into genuinely contemporary fiction.

Writers and critics explore Afrofuturism as both a historical and a global phenomenon.