American Nightmares: Dystopia in Twenty-First-Century Us Fiction

ISBN-13: 9781800797154 / Angielski / Miękka / 2022 / 304 str.

Valentina Romanzi

Opis

This volume investigates dystopia in twenty-first-century US fiction. Using a methodological framework based on sociology, it theorizes a correlation between the crisis of the Frontier myth and of American exceptionalism and a renewed interest in dystopian worlds.

Part One illustrates the methodological framework, exploring the concept of dystopia, offering an overview of the American myths and of their current status and spotlighting some relevant sociological theories.

Part Two applies the proposed methodological framework to four texts, investigating the sub-genres of political, technological and environmental dystopia. The primary works, chosen to show both the relevance of the abovementioned American myths to dystopian narratives and the pervasiveness of the genre across the media, are Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments (2019), Dave Eggers’s The Circle (2013), David Cage’s video game Detroit: Become Human (2018), and the Hughes Brothers’ 2010 movie The Book of Eli.

Spis treści

Contents: Dystopia, at the End of an Era - Framing Dystopia - On Defining Dystopia - Dystopia, SF and Genre Blurring - Confronting the American Myth - Is This Dystopia? - Analysing Dystopia - From Big Brother to Big Data: Surveillance in Political Dystopias - Human Machines, Mechanical Humans: Posthuman Subjectivities in Technological Dystopias - Wandering the Wasteland: Disasters, Trauma and Repetition in Post-apocalyptic Dystopias.

O autorze

Valentina Romanzi is Adjunct Professor of English literature and culture at Ca' Foscari University of Venice and of English at the University of Verona, Italy. She holds a PhD in Transcultural Studies in the Humanities from the University of Bergamo. She specializes in contemporary popular culture, with a particular focus on utopias, dystopias and (post-)apocalyptic fiction. In 2021, she published Contaminazioni. Un approccio interdisciplinare, a collection of essays co-edited with Alessandro Secomandi and Danilo Serra. She is an editor at Iperstoria. Journal of American and English Studies.