Depopulating the Novel

Post-Catastrophe Fiction, Scale, and the Population Unconscious

Bibliographic Data

ID20057585
AuthorsPieter Vermeulen (0000-0003-1992-1646, corresponding author)
Year2022
Pages229-258
Publication date2022-10-11
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeCHAPTER
VenueLife, Re-Scaled (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherOpen Book Publishers (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.11647/obp.0303.09
OpenAlexW4304184154
ISBN9781800647497
LanguageEN
References cited157

Contemporary post-catastrophe fiction typically focuses on a small group of survivors, conveniently getting rid of excess populations by environmental disasters or pandemics. This essay argues that the failure to address the issue of (over)population constitutes an important limitation of these fictions’ capacity to address contemporary social and environmental challenges, as they avoid the question of whether the life forms they imagine are scalable. By situating contemporary post-catastrophe fiction in the longer histories of utopian fiction (which traditionally brackets the problem of scalability), science fiction (where anxieties over over- or depopulation are confronted through the genre’s defining spatiotemporal displacements), and the Victorian novel (which negotiates the pressures that growing populations put on political and aesthetic forms), this essay shows how these fictions engage with the uncertain and contested place of population discourse in contemporary ecological thought

Aesthetics · Art · Environmental ethics · Political science · Politics · Population · Sociology · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Demography · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · History · Law · Philosophy · Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction