Overview

Explores the emphasis that contemporary novels, films and television series place on the present, arguing that hope emerges from the potentiality of the here and now, rather than the future, and as intimately entangled with negotiations of structures of belonging. Taking its cue from an understanding of hope as connoting an organizing temporality, one which is often presumed to be projecting into a future, Hope and Kinship in Contemporary Fiction challenges this understanding, arguing that hope emerges in practices of relationality in the present, disentangling hope from a necessary correlation with futurity. Through close readings of contemporary works, including The Road, The Walking Dead, Cloud Atlas, Sense8, The People in the Trees and A Little Life, Gero Bauer investigates how these texts explore structures of kinship as creative and affective practices of belonging and care that claim spaces beyond the heterosexual, reproductive nuclear family. In this context, fictional figurations of the child – often considered the bearer of the future – are of particular interest. Through these interventions into definitions of and reflections on fictional manifestations of hope and kinship, Bauer’s analyses intersect with queer theory, new materialism and postcritical approaches to literature and cultural studies, moving towards counterintuitively hopeful readings of the present moment.

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Reviews

With unbounded erudition and an admirable ethical and political vision, Gero Bauer boldly rethinks the relationship between hope and kinship in our increasingly precarious contemporary world. Displaying all the hallmarks of literary studies at its best, Bauer’s book offers his readers not only an incisive exploration of recent works of fiction but also a fresh perspective on some of the most urgent theoretical debates in the humanities. * Corey McEleney, Associate Professor of English, Fordham University, USA * Gero Bauer's study is an urgent and impassioned book for and about the present. In a time of seemingly perpetual crisis, how do we maintain our faith in the future? Ranging widely across contemporary culture, and engaging always with the reality of our anxious times, Bauer finds bold imaginings of hope, solidarity, care and belonging – the very things that can make a future possible, now. * Mark Turner, Professor of Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Literature, King’s College London, UK *

Author Information

Gero Bauer is Associate Professor of English and Managing Director of the Center for Gender and Diversity Research at the University of Tübingen, Germany.

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