Atlantic Afterlives in Contemporary Fiction offers fresh readings of what has been called "transatlantic literature". In selected twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts it discovers a shift from oceanic, place-based knowledge to an atmospheric, placeless circulation of information. Consonant with the displacements of the Information Age, this book reads contemporary narrative as it imagines and navigates today's virtual spaces. An important conclusion of the book is that intellectual resources are finite and should be used sustainably. Thus, arguing against a conventional comparative approach, this book proposes reading practices that resist the tendency toward an oversupply of reworked literary contexts that seems bent on matching the reach of the World Wide Web. Instead, the book reimagines place as a practice in the way it is communicated and narrated. Ultimately, this book empowers the reader to reimagine a future for narrative in the Information Age.

"Atlantic Afterlives asks a haunting question: how are we to preserve knowledge and narrative from the smooth, cancelling comforts of pure information? The book offers no single answer, but Ahlberg's subtle and imaginative readings of a range of contemporary writers, from Cormac McCarthy to Michel Faber, from Annie Proulx to Michel Houellebecq, provide many new ways of thinking about literature's relation to a changing world." - Michael Wood, Emeritus Professor of English, Princeton University, USA

Autorentext

Sofia Ahlberg teaches in the Department of Creative Arts and English at La Trobe University, Australia. Her previous publications include articles in journals such as Comparative Literature Studies, Journal of Modern Literature, and Studies in the Humanities.

Zusammenfassung
Thus, arguing against a conventional comparative approach, this book proposes reading practices that resist the tendency toward an oversupply of reworked literary contexts that seems bent on matching the reach of the World Wide Web.

Inhalt

Introduction
PART I: LEAKING OCEANS

1. Narrative Without Borders: Reading Graham Greene in the Information Age
2. Apocalypse Then and Now: The Road, Lord of the Flies, and the Ends of Knowledge
   PART II: UNSOUND WAVES
   3.Through a Border Darkly: North Atlantic Narratives of Exploitation in Peter Hoeg's Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow and Annie Proulx's The Shipping News
3. A Post-Atlantic Divorce: Reading and Writing Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath in the Digital Age
   PART III: THE COASTLESS SEA
4. Bridging Bereavement: Narratives of Loss and Loss of Narrative in Anne Michaels
5. Future Perfect: The Problem of the Human in Michel Houellebecq's Atomised and Philip Roth's The Human Stain
   Conclusion