Overview

In narratives of literature and cultural production, hope and despair remain fundamental in exploring our world. In recent years, political polarization, the Covid pandemic, global warming, and new and ongoing wars have contributed to global crises, to which despair is an understandable response. Yet hope is continually sought and proclaimed. By examining tropes of ruin and regeneration in a wide selection of narratives including memoir, graphic narratives, fiction, film, art, radio plays, culture, rhetoric, and discourse, the book uncovers resonances between them. The anthology moves from the personal to the collective, addressing individual matters of the body and the mind, societal visions of utopia and dystopia, and, finally, hope and despair for the earth itself in representations of apocalypse and the Anthropocene. This structure, alongside the interdisciplinary nature of the project, maps dynamic international perspectives in which hope and despair flow across and through personal, social, and earthly concerns.

Full Product Details

Author:   Johanna M. Wagner ,  Melanie Duckworth (Østfold University College) ,  Deanna Benjamin
Publisher:   Taylor & Francis Ltd
Imprint:   Routledge
Weight:   0.600kg
ISBN:  

9781041107583

ISBN 10:   1041107587
Pages:   226
Publication Date:   13 October 2025
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Tertiary & Higher Education
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Not yet available  
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Table of Contents

List of Contributors Acknowledgments Introduction Johanna M. Wagner, Melanie Duckworth, Deanna Benjamin I Individual Matters: Body and Mind 1 “Common but not normal”: The Narrative of Illness in Duermo mucho [I Sleep a Lot], by Maria Manonelles Ribes Wladimir Chávez 2 Hope and Despair in the Grey Zone: Unlikely Solidarities and Friendships in Negotiating Prolonged Incarceration in Sri Lanka’s Political Prisons Vihanga Perera 3 Spacetime, Tone, and the Sublime: Hope and Despair in Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood Johanna M. Wagner 4 Pessimistic Hope as Rebellion: Fassbinder’s Despair and Utopia Anna Bell II Societal Matters: Utopian and Dystopian Impulses 5 Trauma Memoir as Dystopian Fiction Deanna Benjamin 6 Climbing Mt. Holyoke: Emily Dickinson, Mary Lyon, and Woman-Centered Utopias Aliki Barnstone 7 “Falling Out of the Story”: Asian American Archives, Cruel Optimism, and Emancipatory Apparatuses in Sally Wen Mao’s Oculus and Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown Paul Petrovic 8 “End. Begin. All the same…”: The Ends (And Beginnings) of Worlds in Netflix’s The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance Miranda Liebel 9 At the End of History: Art Practices in Times and Spaces of Modern Ruination Dimitra Gkitsa III Earthly Matters: Apocalypse and the Anthropocene 10 Norwegian Futurisms: Energy Transitions in Young Adult Ecodystopian Fiction Karl Kristian Swane Bambini 11 Animal Voices in the Apocalypse: The Animals in That Country and The Ghost of the Cock Melanie Duckworth 12 The Ruins of Holocene: Notes on Climate Change and the Rise of Disaster Liberalism Iason Zarikos 13 Optimistic vs Ominous: Competing Rhetorics of Ecological Crisis John Farnsworth Index

Reviews

Narratives of Hope and Despair: Ruin and Regeneration in Literature and Culture brings together a rich and diverse collection of voices from across the global scholarly community to explore the various and varied ways in which narrative produces and is produced by the lived, felt experiences of hope and despair. The thirteen chapters that comprise the body of this volume engage myriad genres—from the novel to the graphic novel to film to the radio play to memoir and autobiography, to name only a few—in the quest to rigorously interrogate and thoughtfully articulate ‘how we create and handle hope and despair, ruin and rejuvenation, in narratives of critical moments and times.’ The result is a meticulously researched, highly original, and compelling volume that will be a welcome addition to the bookshelves of academics who represent many fields from across the arts and humanities. Heath A. Diehl, Teaching Professor, Bowling Green State University, USA

Narratives of Hope and Despair: Ruin and Regeneration in Literature and Culture brings together a rich and diverse collection of voices from across the global scholarly community to explore the various and varied ways in which narrative produces and is produced by the lived, felt experiences of hope and despair. The thirteen chapters that comprise the body of this volume engage myriad genres—from the novel to the graphic novel to film to the radio play to memoir and autobiography, to name only a few—in the quest to rigorously interrogate and thoughtfully articulate “how we create and handle hope and despair, ruin and rejuvenation, in narratives of critical moments and times.” The result is a meticulously researched, highly original, and compelling volume that will be a welcome addition to the bookshelves of academics who represent many fields from across the arts and humanities. Heath A. Diehl, Teaching Professor, Bowling Green State University, USA

Author Information

Johanna M. Wagner is Professor of English at Østfold University College in Norway. She publishes in American and British literature, women’s literature, modernism, and film. Her theoretical interests lie at the intersections of gender/sexuality, feminism, affect, critical race theory, and metaphysics. Her last co-edited project was Women and Fairness (2021). Melanie Duckworth is Associate professor of English Literature at Østfold University College, Norway. She publishes in the fields of children’s literature, Australian literature, and ecocriticism. Her most recent co-edited volume is Storying Plants in Australian Children’s and Young Adult Literature: Roots and Winged Seeds (2023). Deanna Benjamin teaches college and creative writing at Washington University in St. Louis, USA. Her creative work can be read in Thimble Literature Magazine, MacQueen’s Quinterly Review, The Texas Review, Flash Boulevard, and other venues. Her critical essay “Writing Someone Else’s Story” appears in Women and Fairness (2021).

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