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Contributing to the emerging field of critical sleep studies, and developing an intervention situated at the intersection of the environmental and the medical humanities, this article considers a range of contemporary texts: Jenny Offill's realist novel Weather (2020), Karen Russell's Sleep Donation (2014), Cherie Dimaline's The Marrow Thieves (2017) and Hunting by Stars (2021) – three examples of the 'sleep-apocalypse' genre – Finegan Kruckemeyer's play Hibernation (2021), and the Perfect Sleep app by Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne (2021). I show how these texts do not just simply reflect the negative effects that climate change has on sleep health, which are manifold, as scientific research evidences. Rather, cultural production arguably draws attention to structural parallels between the climate crisis and the so-called sleep crisis, namely, contemporary society's presumed widespread sleep deprivation and rise in sleep disorders. Both crises are the product of a capitalist system geared towards continuous extraction – and exhaustion – of resources, from the Earth and human bodies. Thus, in the texts considered, sleep is explored, on the one hand, as a casualty of the climate crisis and, on the other hand, as something whose value we need to reassess as part of our ongoing work to avert climate collapse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, narratology has yielded innovative views on how certain narratives create and convey meaning through embodied processes. Such 'embodied narratives' have increasingly been considered to reflect the way human perception itself functions: by drawing upon corporeal impressions before mental cognition, and physical sensation before language. This article suggests that Kim de l'Horizon's Blutbuch offers further productive insight regarding the nature and function of the embodied narrative. The novel – an auto-fictional tale that deals with non-binary identity – shot to fame in the winter of 2022 after winning prestigious literary awards in the German-speaking world; and it has been lauded, in particular, for the pride of place it offers to the author-narrator's embodied perspectives on gender identity. As this article will argue, however, Blutbuch also foregrounds a biopolitical worldview in which all boundaries – and not just those of gender – are seen as superfluous. In doing so, not only does the novel allows its author-narrator to create a narrative body that reappropriates for itself the agency that cisnormative discourse would traditionally deny it, but it also proposes an expanded understanding of the embodied narrative: one that conceives of such forms of writing as metaphors for the body itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article attends to recent examples of British estate literature, a literary form which extends across disparate genres and media. In general, estate literature attempts to correct pernicious prejudices about communities centred on the council estate, stereotypes which align classist, racist, and sexist rhetoric to marginalise this population. In addition to locating recent examples of estate literature – Caleb Femi's, Poor (2020), Anders Lustgarten's The Seven Acts of Mercy (2016), and Guy Gunaratne's In Our Mad and Furious City (2018) – amidst this socio-economic context, this paper also identifies the various formal features these works draw upon to generate a collective voice which at once rejects the othering of the council estate while also resisting the temptation to substitute one reductive group identity label for another. In these texts, often-surprising connections are formed on the grounds of the estate between people, objects, ideas, art, music – and fade as suddenly as they appear. The essay spans media studies, literary criticism, and sociology to argue that the networks conjured by estate literature are not only corrective but generative, inasmuch as they indicate that more affirmative configurations of these networks are possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is concerned with the legacy of modernism in twenty-first century literature. It asks: do contemporary experimental literatures signal a new literary epoch distinct from iterations of modernism, late modernism and postmodernism which preceded them? Or can these categories overlap in the twenty-first century novel? Tackling these questions, this article probes the critical underpinnings that structure the perceived or ignored operation of modernism in contemporary literary practice. In doing so, it subjects to scrutiny the literary critical practices of periodisation which have determined the description of twenty-first century fictional innovation as a new era of literary production (metamodernism, remodernism, post-postmodernism, postfiction). In turn, it indicates a frame of continuity and divergence that caters for the relations between the forms of modernism that have appeared over the last century, as well as the forms of modernism that will inevitably follow our current new modernisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transgressive aesthetics' unrestrained extremity has been problematised by post-Cold War capitalism, via their shared reliance upon unregulated desire. Amanda Filipacchi's Love Creeps reframes transgressive excess through limitation, accounting for transgression's contradictory position within twenty-first century capitalism. The novel's expression of transgressive aesthetics relies upon a fundamental paradox: constriction simultaneously intensifies textual depictions of sexual desire. This apparent incongruity informs the novel's response to the contradictions of contemporary capitalist culture. Initially, the article considers Filipacchi's depiction of desire within a transgressive aesthetic context – beginning with definitions of transgression, before considering how the novel's innovative use of limitation reformulates perversity and extremity to respond to twenty-first century capitalism. Love Creeps' decoupling of content from consequences, via the subversive potential it aligns with limitation, is then reconnected to twentieth century uses of transgressive aesthetics, establishing the intensity Filipacchi produces as a contemporary innovation of this legacy. I argue Filipacchi's counterintuitive use of limitation recalibrates transgressive aesthetics in a way that accounts for the contradictions of contemporary capitalism, presenting an extremity that is furthered by the very limitation that intuitively should diminish it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The scientific laboratory is often construed as a space in which laboratory animals are sacrificed on the altar of biomedical progress. However, this understanding of nonhuman animals raises significant ethical concerns and appears complicit in the anthropocentric and colonial violence that creates sacrifice zones in Naomi Klein's sense. In this article, we argue that contemporary literature can work towards an imaginative and affective reframing of the lab, which is no longer seen as a sacrifice zone but as a contact zone—a space of relationality and entanglement across the human-nonhuman divide. To explore this shift, we offer close readings of two contemporary narratives that centre on the lab: Tania Hershman's short story 'Grounded' and Jeff VanderMeer's The Strange Bird. In both of these texts, animals refuse to be made data through sacrifice and instead affirm, if in a limited sense, their own autonomy and vitality. Literary experimentation on a stylistic level plays a key role in this process: our readings highlight how both narratives evoke embodied (and more specifically haptic) connectedness with animals by deploying literary strategies that deconstruct the visual language associated with scientific objectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To frame this collection of essays, this introduction reviews existing research on sacrifice zones and related concepts, extractivist thinking and regenerative mindsets, and the presence of damaged settings in contemporary literature and literary history. To be more precise, it considers the affordances and limitations of notions such as the extractive zone, the contact zone, and the critical zone alongside attempts to articulate hopeful strategies of counter-extractivist reading and writing before identifying precursors of the sacrifice zone in the literary archive and briefly sketching recent shifts in mining and extraction technologies. To illustrate these points, the paper then turns to Lucy Ellmann's Ducks, Newburyport and explains how this angry novel represents violated sites as well as settings of hope and resists the easy solutions of compromise aesthetics by summoning an indignant and anti-extractivist public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article historicises Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Series novels in terms of 1970s feminism. The novels provide a phenomenological account of the development of the autonomist Italian left in the 1970s, but unlike most histories of this process, they centre the gendered contradictions within that political milieu. This narrative arc demands to be contextualised with the ideas of Italian feminists Carla Lonzi, Mariarosa dalla Costa, and the major Anglophone thinkers of Marxist Feminism. The Neapolitan Series investigates the feminist potential of relationships among women, even women who have no political consciousness in the common sense of the term, a potential that is illuminated by contrast with the oppressive effect of the most ardent and sophisticated male Marxists. What is crucial however, and this is at the heart of this article, is the fact that Ferrante stages this skewering of male proletarian rebels amid the finely wrought depictions of the capitalist immiseration of working-class women's lives and the inanity of bourgeois feminism. In short, this essay uses Ferrante (and her sensational popularity) as a way of thinking about the current revival of interest in 1970s feminism as an expression of the desire to reconcile the central tenets of Radical and Marxist Feminisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I read and analyse the novel Satantango (1985) by the Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai's. Set in a small community in rural Eastern Hungary – before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet regime – where the rain is falling incessantly, all hope has been lost, history has ended before it even began, and the houses are crumbling from the inside out, the novel is, for obvious reasons, often considered to have a tone of brutal and bleak pessimism. Robert Boyers thus talks about Krasznahorkai's 'pessimistic virtuosity' and literary realism, the sole purpose of which is disillusion. In this article, however, I would like to contest this claim and look for some paradoxical glimpses of hope hidden in the anatomy of hopelessness that the author undoubtedly makes manifest trough a radical materialism; a hope against hope. I argue that Krasznahorkai destroys necessity with necessity. To that end I will bring in the work of Ernst Bloch as well as Jacques Ranciére's book on filmmaker Bela Tarr who has adapted several of Krasznahorkai's novels for the screen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Description has made something of a comeback in recent years as part of a theorising of possibilities for a post-hermeneutical critical orientation. The present essay considers the descriptive turn, so-called, in relation to a range of writing that crosses the boundaries of the critical and the creative: in work by Claire-Louise Bennett, Lisa Robertson, Wayne Koestenbaum and R. F. Langley. The essay identifies in this writing an occupancy of description's register as it has been articulated over the ages by a frequently sceptical regulatory discourse: description as understood to be variously gratuitous, ornamental or passively affirmative. Rather than suggest an expanded field of contemporary descriptive practice, the proposal here is for description conceived as a minor mode, a relatively rare happening, but all the more valuable for being so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of the New Sincerity in contemporary American fiction has largely been read on terms provided by a handful of early proponents. This article contends that more complex formulations of the notion are necessary if it is to remain useful as a descriptor for important qualities of recent texts. Among issues in need of greater attention are the implications of the New Sincerity for historical awareness, a topic I pursue via consideration of William T. Vollmann's grappling with literary history. I argue that Vollmann's works offer more than the pastiche that allegedly defined historical consciousness in postmodernist fiction. His intertextual engagements with Edgar Allan Poe are especially valuable for modelling some of the ways recent fictions bypass postmodernist ahistoricism in favour of connections to a usable past, and, especially, a usable literary tradition. Readings of Vollmann's 'The Grave of Lost Stories' (in several editions) and 'The Cemetery of the World' show how he employs research in the textual archive as a figuration of relations to the past that can serve the ends of renewal and recovery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article locates a form of literary realism adapted to the event of climate change in Don DeLillo’s late fiction. The social element of the realist novel is shaped by limits in human empathy. ‘If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life’, writes George Eliot in Middlemarch, ‘it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence’. That ‘roar’ has become intelligible as global warming, and the world fashioned by the sensations of the bourgeois body is now vulnerably, imperfectly separated from a larger ecological reality. DeLillo’s late fiction attunes itself to this reality through its emphasis on the contingent character of sensation. In ‘Midnight in Dostoevsky’, Libra, Underworld and other works, momentary impressions gleaned from an environment capture the ‘whole life’ - a figure’s past, future and life’s meaning. A tension between these ‘whole lives’ and the consistently disruptive environments from which they are drawn expands the receptive field of DeLillo’s fiction, producing an ecological realism that suggests future possibilities for extending the range of human empathy to objects as big as global warming and the planet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can we read contemporary fiction in the age of its real subsumption under capital? How can we avoid explaining it as just one more commodity? This presentation explores these questions by returning to the proximity between neoliberalism and biopolitics in Foucault’s 1978–1979 lectures, and by describing the tension between contemporary literature and neoliberal biopolitics as a relation ofreciprocal saturation: while the market has colonised all but the most marginal fields of culture, the market has in its turn adopted markedly literary strategies, of which the mobilisation of affect and the manipulation of potentiality are the two most important. Neither a form of surface reading nor of interpretation, the reading alongside the market that I propose reads for contemporary fiction’s engagement with affect and potentiality, in order to trace the minimal difference between its textual performance and its biopolitical solicitation. I illustrate this approach through a brief reading of Teju Cole’sOpen Cityand a more extensive discussion of Dinaw Mengestu’sThe Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]