Kaisa Kaukiainen, Kaisa Kurikka, Hanna Mäkelä, Elise Nykänen,
Sanna Nyqvist, Juha Raipola, Anne Riippa,Hanna Samola (eds),
Narratives of Fear and Safety,
Tampere University Press, 2020.
EAN13 : 9789523590151.
The essays in this edited volume, written in English and French, tackle the intriguing problems of fear and safety by analysing their various meanings and manifestations in literature and other narrative media. The articles bring forth new, cross-cultural interpretations on fear and safety through examining what kinds of genre-specific means of world-making narratives use to express these two affectivities. The articles also show how important it is to study these themes in order to understand challenges in times of global threats, such as the climate crisis.
The main themes of the book are approached from various theoretical perspectives as related to their literary and cultural representations. Recent trends in research, such as affect and risk theory, serve as the basis for the discussion. The articles in the volume also draw from disciplines such as gender studies and trauma studies to examine the threats posed by collective fears and aggression on individuals' lives and propose ways of coping with fear. These themes are addressed also in articles analysing new adaptations of old myths that retell stories of the past.
Many of the articles in the volume discuss apocalyptic and dystopian narratives that currently permeate the entire cultural landscape. Dystopian narratives do not only deal with future threats, such as totalitarianism, technocracy, or environmental disasters, but also suggest alternative ways of being and new hopes in the form of political resistance.
Table of contents
Introduction: Affective spaces in European literature
and other narrative media 11
Elise Nykänen & Hanna Samola
I
Cultural politics of fear and safety
L’œuvre, la peur et le temps : Pour une saisie du risque
par la littérature 35
Anne Duprat
Knocking on Europe’s door: How narratives of fear,
insecurity and nostalgia shape collective perceptions of immigration 59
Anna Notaro
Pro loco et tempore : La littérature portugaise à
l’épicentre de la crise économique 91
Serafina Martins
II
Fear and safety across genres
“We have to fix this world now”: Hope, utopianism, and
new modes of political agency in two contemporary
Finnish young adult dystopias 115
Maria Laakso
La sécurité ou l’exacerbation des peurs au profit d’une
liberté provisoire 137
Orlane Glises De La Rivière
Mind the gap: Fear on the London Underground 155
Cristiana Pugliese
Peur du chaos et retour à l’humain : Le mythe du yéti
selon Hergé et Castelli-Manara 179
Brigitte Le Juez
III
Cultural and transcultural perspectives on fear and safety
Fear of unjust memory or desire for secure
identity? Remembering the era of 1989 transition in contemporary Polish novel 201
Olga Szmidt
Fear of the Other: Representations of Otherness in Irish
and Ukrainian famine fictions 229
Tatiana Krol
The fear of cultural belonging: Sharon Dodua Otoo’s transnational writing 249
Nora Moll
Fear and safety in contemporary Russian cinema:
A transcultural perspective 269
Beata Waligórska-Olejniczak
Divakaruni’s Before We Visit the Goddess: Overcoming
fears and instabilities 289
Metka Zupančič
IV Coping with fear
Post-traumatic stress disorder (ptsd) as posthumanity
in graphic narratives 317
Lisa DeTora
Of murdered babies and silenced histories: Gendering
memory in two francophone trauma narratives 341
Nathalie Ségeral
Peur et humour : Le cas de l’humour noir 363
Jean-Marc Moura
L’Autre dans la fiction post-apocalyptique du XXIe siècle 379
Jasmin Hammon
V
The end of the world? From cultural ecologies to ecological disasters
Michel Deguy’s l’être-comme and the poetics of
ecological comparativism 407
Sam La Védrine
Sans dessus dessous (1889) de Jules Verne : Dernier avertissement avant l’Apocalypse 439
Laure Lévêque
Le Japon de Fukushima comme lieu de discours pour
des auteurs francophones 461
Sabine Kraenker
L’invention de la catastrophe au xviiie siècle : Une
invention renouvelée à la croisée de la littérature, de
l’histoire des sociétés et de l’histoire environnementale 489
Sandra Contamina