The Poetics and Ethics of (Un-) Grievability in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction
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Edited by Susana Onega, Jean-Michel Ganteau#

A new publication by Professor Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau, members of the Literary and Theatrical Studies section of Academia Europaea.

The working hypothesis of the book is that, since the 1990s, an increasing number of Anglophone fictions are responding to the new ethical and political demands arising out of the facts of war, exclusion, climate change, contagion, posthumanism and other central issues of our post-trauma age by adapting the conventions of traditional forms of expressing grievability, such as elegy, testimony or (pseudo-)autobiography. Situating themselves in the wake of Judith Butler’s work on (un-)grievability, the essays collected in this volume seek to cast new light on these issues by delving into the socio-cultural constructions of grievability and other types of vulnerabilities, invisibilities and inaudibilities linked with the neglect and/or abuse of non-normative individuals and submerged groups that have been framed as disposable, exploitable and/or unmournable by such determinant factors as sex, gender, ethnic origin, health, etc., thereby refining and displacing the category of subalternity associated with the poetics of postmodernism.

Year of publication: 2022
Publisher: Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature. London and New York. Routledge, 2023. 216 pp.
ISBN: 9781032389752 (hbk)
ISBN: 9781032389769 (pbk)\ISBN: 9781003347811 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003347811

About the Editors#

Susana Onega is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Zaragoza. She has written extensively on contemporary British literature, narrative poetics, ethics and trauma. She is currently editing with Jean-Michel Ganteau The Brill Handbook on Literary Criticism and Theory.

Jean-Michel Ganteau is Professor of Contemporary British Literature at the University Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3. He is the editor of Études britanniques contemporaines and has authored The Ethics and Aesthetics of Vulnerability in Contemporary British Literature (Routledge, 2015) and The Ethics and Aesthetics of Attention in Contemporary British Literature (Routledge, 2023).