9/11 is not simple a date on the calendar but marks a distinct historical threshold, ushering in the war on terror, various states of emergency, a supposed “clash of civilizations,” and the putative legitimation of counter-democratic procedures ranging from extraordinary renditions to enhanced interrogation. Perhaps no date, since Virginia Woolf declared that “on or about December 1910 human character changed,” has marked such a singular point in the perception of time, identity and nature. Women’s writing has always been something of a counter-canon, offering modes of voice and point of view beyond that of the “man” of reason. This collection of essays explores the two problems of what it means to write as a woman and what it means to write in the twenty-first century.

Evolving from a rigorous study of post-9/11 women's writing, Dr. Heather Hillsburg's new monograph identifies an emerging genre, which she names Urban Captivity Narratives. Using examples ranging from memoir to young adult fiction, each of the texts examined in the study follows a female protagonist who has survived abduction, been held captive for months or even years, and subjected to sexual, emotional, and physical abuse by their captor. Hillsburg contextualizes these narratives, and takes into consideration our current political atmosphere, the role of patriarchy, and various social anxieties that come into play when discussing the kind of oppression seen in these narratives.

Traditional apocalyptic texts concern the advent of a better world at the end of history that will make sense of everything that happened before. But what is at stake in the contemporary shift to apocalyptic narratives in which the utopian end of time is removed? The Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Novel offers an innovative critical model for our cultural obsession with 'the end' by focussing on the significance of time in the 21st-century post-apocalyptic novel and challenging traditional apocalyptic logic. Once confined to the genre of science fiction, the increasing popularity of end-of-the-world narratives has caused apocalyptic writing to feature in the work of some of contemporary literature's most well-known fiction writers. Considering novels by Will Self, Cormac McCarthy, David Mitchell, Emily St. John Mandel, Jeanette Winterson and others, Diletta De Cristofaro frames the contemporary apocalyptic imagination as a critique of modernity's apocalyptic conception of time and history. Interdisciplinary in scope, the book historicises apocalyptic beliefs by exploring how relentlessly they have shaped the modern world.

This book focuses on the way that notions of home and identity have changed for Muslims as a result of international 'war on terror' rhetoric. It uniquely links the post-9/11 stereotyping of Muslims and Islam in the West to the roots of current jihadism and the resurgence of ethnocentrism within the subcontinent and beyond.

This book explores how alarmist social discourses about 'cruel' young people fail to recognize the complexity of cruelty and the role it plays in child agency. Examining representations of cruel young people in popular texts and popular culture, the collected essays demonstrate how gender, race, and class influence who gets labeled 'cruel' and which actions are viewed as negative, aggressive, and disruptive. It shows how representations of cruel young people negotiate the violence that shadows polite society, and how narratives of cruelty and aggression are used to affirm, or to deny, young people’s agency.

This four-volume reference work surveys American literature from the early 20th century to the present day, featuring a diverse range of American works and authors and an expansive selection of primary source materials. Bringing useful and engaging material into the classroom, this four-volume set covers more than a century of American literary history—from 1900 to the present. Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context profiles authors and their works and provides overviews of literary movements and genres through which readers will understand the historical, cultural, and political contexts that have shaped American writing. Twentieth-Century and Contemporary American Literature in Context provides wide coverage of authors, works, genres, and movements that are emblematic of the diversity of modern America. Not only are major literary movements represented, such as the Beats, but this work also highlights the emergence and development of modern Native American literature, African American literature, and other representative groups that showcase the diversity of American letters. A rich selection of primary documents and background material provides indispensable information for student research.

This book offers new ways of constellating the literary and cinematic delineations of Indian and Pakistani Muslim diasporic and migrant trajectories narrated in the two decades after the 9/11 attacks. Focusing on four Pakistani English novels and four Indian Hindi films, it examines the aesthetic complexities of staging the historical nexus of global conflicts and unravels the multiple layers of discourses underlying the notions of diaspora, citizenship, nation and home. It scrutinises the “flirtatious” nature of transnational desires and their role in building glocal safety valves for inclusion and archiving a planetary vision of trauma. It also provides a fresh perspective on the role of Pakistani English novels and mainstream Hindi films in tracing the multiple origins and shifts in national xenophobic practices, and negotiating multiple modalities of political and cultural belonging. It discusses various books and films including The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Burnt Shadows, My Name is Khan, New York, Exit West, Home Fire, AirLift and Tiger Zinda Hai. In light of the twentieth anniversary of 9/11 attacks, current debates on terror, war, paranoid national imaginaries and the suspicion towards migratory movements of refugees, this book makes a significant contribution to the interdisciplinary debates on border controls and human precarity. A crucial work in transnational and diaspora criticism, it will be of great interest to researchers of literature and culture studies, media studies, politics, film studies, and South Asian studies.

From early medieval times to the present, this diverse collection of thirty-one essays sets literary texts in their historical contexts.

Reverse colonization narratives are stories like H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, in which technologically superior Martians invade and colonize England. They ask Western audiences to imagine what it’s like to be the colonized rather than the colonizers. David Higgins argues that although some reverse colonization stories are thoughtful and provocative, reverse colonization fantasy has also led to the prevalence of a very dangerous kind of science fictional thinking in our current political culture. It has become popular among groups such as anti-feminists, white supremacists, and far-right reactionaries to appropriate a sense of righteous, anti-imperial victimhood—the sense that white men, in particular, are somehow colonized victims fighting an insurgent resistance against an oppressive establishment. Nothing could be timelier, as an armed far-right mob stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, in an effort to stop the presidential election from being “stolen from them.” Higgins shows that this reverse colonization stance depends upon a science fictional logic that achieved dominance within imperial fantasy during the 1960s and has continued to gain momentum ever since. By identifying with fantastic forms of victimhood, subjects who already enjoy social hegemony are able to justify economic inequality, expansions of police and military power, climatological devastation, new articulations of racism, and countless other forms of violence—all purportedly in the name of security, self-defense, and self-protection.

This book traces the genealogy of ‘women’s fiction’ in South Asia and looks at the interesting and fascinating world of fiction by Muslim women. It explores how Muslim women have contributed to the growth and development of genre fiction in South Asia and brings into focus diverse genres, including speculative, horror, campus fiction, romance, graphic, dystopian amongst others, from the early 20th century to the present. The book debunks myths about stereotypical representations of South Asian Muslim women and critically explores how they have located their sensibilities, body, religious/secular identities, emotions, and history, and have created a space of their own. It discusses works by authors such as Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, Hijab Imtiaz Ali, Mrs. Abdul Qadir, Muhammadi Begum, Abbasi Begum, Khadija Mastur, Qurratulain Hyder, Wajida Tabbasum, Attia Hosain, Mumtaz Shah Nawaz, Selina Hossain, Shaheen Akhtar, Bilquis Sheikh, Gulshan Esther, Maha Khan Phillips, Zahida Zaidi, Bina Shah, Andaleeb Wajid, and Ayesha Tariq. A volume full of remarkable discoveries for the field of genre fiction, both in South Asia and for the wider world, this book, in the Studies in Global Genre Fiction series, will be useful for scholars and researchers of English literary studies, South Asian literature, cultural studies, history, Islamic feminism, religious studies, gender and sexuality, sociology, translation studies, and comparative literatures.