Precarity in Contemporary Literature and Culture

Peter Simonsen is Professor of European literature in the Department for the Study of Culture at the University of Southern Denmark. He is the author of Wordsworth and Word-Preserving Arts (2007) and several related articles on Romanticism, ekphrasis and textual materiality. In 2014 he published (in Danish) Lifelong Lives, a study of fiction about old age and the welfare state. Peter was co-editor of Literature: An Introduction to Theory and Analysis published by Bloomsbury in 2017.Emily J. Hogg is Associate Professor in the Department for the Study of Culture at the University of Southern Denmark. She has contributed to many journals and books including Textual Practice, English Studies, The Social History of Alcohol and Drugs: An Interdisciplinary Journal, The Routledge Companion to Twenty First Century Literary Fiction, edited by Robert Eaglestone and Daniel O’Gorman (2019), and New Feminist Studies: Twenty-First Century Critical Interventions, edited by Jennifer Cooke (2020).

• List of figuresList of contributors Acknowledgements IntroductionPart One: FeelingChapter 1 – Anxious reading: the precarity novel and the affective class – Liam Connell, University of Brighton, UKChapter 2 – Anxiety in the precariat: The affects of class in James Kelman’s fiction – Mathies G. Aarhus, University of Southern DenmarkChapter 3 – Performing precarity: threatening the audience in Gary Owen’s Iphigenia in Splott – Peter Simonsen, University of Southern DenmarkPart Two: BodiesChapter 4 – Imagined sovereignty: mapping and resisting precarity in Indira Allegra’s Woven Account – Marianne Kongerslev, Aalborg University, DenmarkChapter 5 – Precarious Bodies on the Move, Precarious Bodies Under Attack – Katharina Pewny, previously Ghent University, Belgium and Tessa Vannieuwenhuyze, doctoral researcherChapter 6 – Death knells and dead ends: Latent futurity in Masande Ntshanga’s The Reactive and Mohale Mashigo’s ‘Ghost Strain N’ – Sophy Kohler, University of Southern DenmarkPart Three: TimeChapter 7 – Periodization and precarious labour: the work of genre in La La Land and Sorry to Bother You’ – Alissa G. Karl, State University of New York, Brockport, USAChapter 8 - Substanceless Subjectivity: From Proletarianization to Precarization in British Experimental Fiction – Benjamin Kohlmann, University of Regensburg, GermanyChapter 9 - The Future is a Ghost’: Precarity, Anticipation and Retrospection in Anneliese Mackintosh’s ‘Limited Dreamers’ and Lee Rourke’s Vulgar Things – Emily J. Hogg, University of Southern DenmarkChapter 10 – ‘Make it Now’: poetry, precarity, and security in Jorie Graham and Ghayath Almadhoun – Walt Hunter, Clemson University, USAChapter 11 - Finding time in common: speculative fiction and the precariat in Robinson’s New York 2140 – Bryan Yazell, University of Southern DenmarkIndex

Precarity in Contemporary Literature and Culture is an original and impressive collection of thoughtfully argued essays. Using a common language drawn from recent theories of precarity and precaritization, the contributors explore themes of risk, uncertainty, and vulnerability across a broad array of genres that include fiction, poetry, film, and theatre. The collection offers a searing indictment of the ravages of neoliberalism, and it thinks creatively about how aesthetic experimentation can make these ravages evident and, potentially, remediable.