Narratives of Hope and Despair

Ruin and Regeneration in Literature and Culture

By: Johanna M. Wagner (Editor), Melanie Duckworth (Editor), Deanna Benjamin (Editor)

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Hardcover | 14 October 2025 | Edition Number 1

At a Glance

Hardcover
238 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.42

Hardcover

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In narratives of literature and cultural production, hope and despair remain fundamental in exploring our world. In recent years, political polarization, the Covid pandemic, global warming, and new and ongoing wars have contributed to global crises, to which despair is an understandable response. Yet hope is continually sought and proclaimed. By examining tropes of ruin and regeneration in a wide selection of narratives including memoir, graphic narratives, fiction, film, art, radio plays, culture, rhetoric, and discourse, the book uncovers resonances between them. The anthology moves from the personal to the collective, addressing individual matters of the body and the mind, societal visions of utopia and dystopia, and, finally, hope and despair for the earth itself in representations of apocalypse and the Anthropocene. This structure, alongside the interdisciplinary nature of the project, maps dynamic international perspectives in which hope and despair flow across and through personal, social, and earthly concerns.

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