Narratives of Hope and Despair

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.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

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).