The Child to Come: Life After the Human Catastrophe
Rebekah Sheldon
Abstract
The Child to Come reads American culture from the 1960s to the present as a period in which the anxious apprehension of nonhuman vitality has sought alleviation in the figure of the child. Yet the salvific life of the child only assuages to the degree that it also gives expression to the forces of nonhuman vitality it was fitted to capture. Drawing on arguments in the field of childhood studies about the interweaving of the child with the life sciences, the book argues that neither life nor the child are what they used to be. Under pressure from ecological change, artificial reproductive techn ... More
Keywords: American literature, Science fiction criticism, Popular culture, Queer theory, Childhood studies, Posthumanism, Apocalypse & catastrophe, Animal studies, Neoliberalism, Somatic capitalism
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2016 | Print ISBN-13: 9780816689873 |
| Published to Minnesota Scholarship Online: May 2017 | DOI:10.5749/minnesota/9780816689873.001.0001 |
