Depending on your disposition, it's either a very good or a very bad time to read about apocalypse. Good if you're looking for a literary path through the flaming hellscape of coronavirus, climate change, border wars, white supremacy, and incipient fascism; bad if you'd prefer some escapist fare. Curiously, Mark Payne's Flowers of Time: On Postapocalyptic Fiction satisfies both impulses. Although it is indeed an examination of postapocalyptic fiction, from the eighth-century Greek poet Hesiod's work to Mary Shelley's The Last Man (1826) and all the way up to Colson Whitehead's Zone One (2011), the book is resolutely optimistic. Payne is interested in “large-scale works of literary fiction that stage how new forms of life emerge from catastrophe, how survivors adapt to the altered conditions of existence” (2). By “new” Payne means better, as he states explicitly early on: “postapocalyptic fiction is by definition catastrophic,” he writes, but the catastrophe...
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SARAH WASSERMAN is associate professor of English and director of the Center for Material Culture Studies at the University of Delaware. She is the author of The Death of Things: Ephemera and the American Novel (2020) and coeditor of Modelwork: The Material Culture of Making and Knowing (2021) and Cultures of Obsolescence (2015). Her essays appear in PMLA, American Literary History, Post45, ASAP/J, Contemporary Literature, Lit Compass, and numerous edited volumes. Her public writing has been published in Public Books, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Flaunt Magazine. She is currently at work on Computer Love, a book about 1980s pop cultural representations of computers.
Sarah Wasserman; The End of the World as We Know It. Novel 1 May 2023; 56 (1): 146–150. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-10251370
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