Blanchot, Ecology and Contemporary Fiction: The Thought of the Disaster
By (Author) Jonathan Boulter
Edinburgh University Press
Edinburgh University Press
10th November 2025
United Kingdom
Tertiary Education
Non Fiction
Literary theory
Literary studies: general
Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers
Philosophy: aesthetics
194
Paperback
240
Width 156mm, Height 234mm
Blanchot, Ecology and Contemporary Fiction: The Thought of the Disaster delves into Maurice Blanchot's enigmatic, and deeply influential, notion of the disaster a term Blanchot famously refuses to define. By exploring the novels of Jon McGregor, Mike McCormack, David Mitchell, Jeanette Winterson and Maggie Gee, Jonathan Boulter suggests that we can think of literature, the space of the imagination, as the place where some conception (ethical, ecological, or ontological) of the disaster emerges. These novels, all in some ways about the disaster, just as they are inflected by the disaster, become the place where an understanding of critical events death, ecological catastrophe, pandemics is possible.