Apocalyptic Worlds: A Contemporary Critique of the Post-traumatological Novel at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century

This thesis posits that in the twenty-first century we are witnessing a literary turn comprised of a collective authorial attempt to work through and come to terms with the apocalyptic spirit of the contemporary world. The novels explored in this thesis, which are paradigmatic of this wider literary movement, reflect upon the cultural anxieties of contemporary life from what is being referred to here as a post-traumatological location of imaginative retrospect. This discussion reveals that contemporary apocalyptic fiction is for the most part motivated not by a sense of post-catastrophic mourning, as was the case with the wave of literature to have arisen in response to the events of 9/11 at the turn of the millennium, but by a speculative condition of post-traumatic recovery, borne out of recent apocalyptic fears and concerns. Apocalyptic fiction responds to collective anxieties concerning the future of the present world. From its distinct temporal location of retrospect, the apocalyptic novel can provide insights surrounding not only the conditions of contemporary crisis, but more importantly, provoke ways and means by which we might confront the narrative of apocalypse that appears to exemplify the early decades of the twenty-first century. Guided by both anxiety and hope, the post-traumatological novel looks back to the present from a time and place in which our concerns about the future have been realised. By imagining the world as if it has come to an end, or is in the process of ending, these novels actively address the anxieties of the twenty-first century from spaces of aftermath.