This essay responds to the perception that later twentieth-century experience underwent a shallowing of intensity – what Fredric Jameson famously diagnosed as a ‘waning of Affect’.

The essay reads this shallowing, as it is represented in the novel of the period, and as it reflects the logic of late capitalism, and of neoliberal culture. But while it examines the ways in which the novel partakes of this logic, it suggests at the same time that the experience of shallowness itself yields a particular kind of intensity, one which is at odds with its affective weakening. If we are to understand the relation between late capitalism, neoliberalism and waning of affect, we have to address the ways in which shallowness become its own kind of intensity – in which shallowness and intensity enter into a shifted relation with one another.

Reading the later twentieth-century novel from Philip Roth to Muriel Spark to Margaret Atwood to James Kelman, the essay argues that we can see a form of fictional expression emerging at this time, in which the novel does not abandon its commitment to forms of political intensity, but in which it rewrites the given relations between the weighty and the trivial, between weakening and intensifying, between fiction and reality.

This chapter focuses on the fiction of women’s liberation and its representations of vegetarianism. The first part offers readings of the fiction of Brigid Brophy, a pioneer of the animal rights movement, and Isabel Colegate in the context of the British class system; the second uses several novels by North American writers (Margaret Atwood, Marge Piercy, Alison Lurie) to offer a rethinking of Carol J. Adams’s theory of feminist-vegetarianism before suggesting the ways in which Octavia Butler’s novel Dawn helps us to link vegetarian/vegan theory with decolonial theory and practice.

Can a poem create a world? Among other poets, Wallace Stevens affirms a poem's capacity to make a mountain or even a planet. This chapter examines the history behind the idea of the poem as worldmaking, from Renaissance ideas rooted in antiquity, through Enlightenment concepts such as heterocosm, to modernist ideas of autonomy, including W. H. Auden's “secondary worlds.” Allowing for subsequent historicist, political, and poststructuralist critiques of such ideas, it argues for the enduring value of the concept of poem as worldmaking. Some theorists of lyric have advanced a notion of the poem as a ritualistic event of enunciation and others have held that the poem, even if not primarily mimetic, still evokes a world. This chapter argues for a synthetic model of the poem as enacting an event in language and as also producing a polyspatial, polytemporal world, as exemplified by poems by Patience Agbabi, Margaret Atwood, Tracy K. Smith, and others. Drawing on the field of world literature, it explores how the poem's transnational and transhistorical travel worlds the world. Analyzing a poem by A. K. Ramanujan, it asks about the ethical implications of a poem's worldwide reach.

The author attends a conference on gene editing in Paris and muses on the varied scientific, professional, religious, governmental, military, corporate, and advocacy-based participants invited to formulate public policy recommendations. Where, he wonders, are the cultural perspectives that could illuminate ethical issues in all their depth and complexity?

This chapter defines a new genre of biodystopian fiction characterized by the internalization of dystopia in every cell of the subject’s body. Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story, Philip Kerr’s A Philosophical Investigation, and Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy are only a few of the recent novels that construct nightmare societies shaped by the consequences of unethical uses of genetics. These fictions portray the consequences of illegal experimentation on human subjects, designer babies, monocrop agriculture, direct-to-consumer gene editing, bioterrorism, genetically engineered pandemics, posthuman clones, and a world overrun with transgenic animals. Extrapolating from current developments in genetics, these novels contrast starkly with the optimistic prophecies of prominent scientists who suggest that advances in behavioral genetics will reduce racism, the stigmatization of people with undesirable characteristics, and other forms of discrimination.

Chapter 5 turns to a much bleaker vision of the Anthropocene: the widely shared suspicion that catastrophe is all but inevitable. In this part of the book, I attend to various dystopian visions of our climate-changed world, by first delivering a historical overview according to which the apocalypse's construal in public discourse has recently undergone significant transformations. Dystopias perform one major function in this context - they warn an audience about existential threats that are imminent, but whose true causes still remain concealed from public purview. In the case of climate change, we ought to distinguish more specifically, I suggest, between cautionary and post-cautionary narratives. Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy navigates this divide by probing where grave dangers might erupt from within the status quo, without suffocating the desire for alternative ways of being and living. Atwood’s books are so insightful because they move back and forth between a storyline that traces how the environmental catastrophe came about and another one that unravels the surprising ways in which the surviving humans collaborate with other species to build a common future.

This chapter thinks through the transnational market in organ transplantation, an industry that has many economic and geographic parallels with the fertility industry. I demonstrate how it, too, is implicated in a racialized production of the human and the channeling of vitality toward lives deemed more valuable in a global organ economy. The chapter analyzes two recent novels that extend this precarious condition more widely, to argue that this generalized vulnerability to becoming commodified is central to why the liberal humanist dispositif is not only historically compromised but also contemporarily ineffective. Both Margaret Atwood’s The Heart Goes Last and Ninni Holmqvist’s The Unit are premised on an expansion of the category of disposable life that is at root an economic assessment of the contribution that life can make. These novels reiterate and draw our attention to how the real subsumption of life by capital, as shaped by the transplantation industry, is rewriting how we value life in contexts that extend far beyond the lives of organ donors and recipients.

Presents Margaret Atwood as a Canadian and international literary superstar, introducing students and general readers to the many different and evolving facets of Atwood’s work across all genres, up to and including The Testaments. This revised edition is both a revisiting of Atwood’s earlier work and a charting of new directions since 2000, with emphasis on her increasing engagement with popular genres, especially dystopias and graphic novels, and her influential online presence. The focus is on Atwood’s topicality, with The Handmaid’s Tale and its recent television adaptations now center stage. Atwood engages with a new generation in response to profound changes in reading practices and changing conditions in publishing and marketing. Atwood’s often controversial feminism and her urgent environmental concerns with survival are treated in the brief overview of her work and Atwoodian criticism since 2000, including discussion of the Atwood archives at the University of Toronto.

“The Essential Ecosystem” considers how environmentalist appeals to self-dissolution have influenced and undermined a number of identity movements and academic paradigms in the 1970s and after. Specifically, Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing (1972) dramatizes and ultimately compromises the ideals of contemporary “nature feminists,” those who viewed reproductive capacity not only as the cornerstone of essential womanhood, but also as a privileged means of ecological awareness. The narrator’s own attempted identification with her biology broadens her idea of reproduction to include all material functions, from nutrient consumption to decomposition. This fixation on network disorients gender rather than shores it up. However, far from undermining identity, it also illuminates the extent to which social thought has at times rendered whole systems as a matter of essentialism. Reading Surfacing alongside Atwood’s later work illuminates lines of rhetorical continuity between the essentialist “all women” position in nature feminism and a potential “all matter” position in contemporary new-materialist writing.