Atlantic Afterlives in Contemporary Fiction

Sofia Ahlberg teaches in the Department of Creative Arts and English at La Trobe University, Australia. Her previous publications include articles in journals such as Comparative Literature Studies, Journal of Modern Literature, and Studies in the Humanities.

• IntroductionPART I: LEAKING OCEANS1. Narrative Without Borders: Reading Graham Greene in the Information Age2. Apocalypse Then and Now: The Road, Lord of the Flies, and the Ends of KnowledgePART II: UNSOUND WAVES 3.Through a Border Darkly: North Atlantic Narratives of Exploitation in Peter Hoeg's Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow and Annie Proulx's The Shipping News4. A Post-Atlantic Divorce: Reading and Writing Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath in the Digital AgePART III: THE COASTLESS SEA5. Bridging Bereavement: Narratives of Loss and Loss of Narrative in Anne Michaels6. Future Perfect: The Problem of the Human in Michel Houellebecq's Atomised and Philip Roth's The Human StainConclusion

"Atlantic Afterlives asks a haunting question: how are we to preserve knowledge and narrative from the smooth, cancelling comforts of pure information? The book offers no single answer, but Ahlberg's subtle and imaginative readings of a range of contemporary writers, from Cormac McCarthy to Michel Faber, from Annie Proulx to Michel Houellebecq, provide many new ways of thinking about literature's relation to a changing world." - Michael Wood, Emeritus Professor of English, Princeton University, USA