Understanding US culture through the post-apocalyptic novel

This book explores the post-apocalyptic novel in American literature from the 1940s to the present as reflections of a growing anxiety about the decline of US hegemony. Post-apocalyptic novels imagine human responses to the aftermath of catastrophe. The shape of the future they imagine is defined by "the remainder," when what is left behind expresses itself in storytelling tropes. Since 1945 the portentous fate of the United States has shifted from the irradiated future of nuclear holocaust to the saltwater wash of global warming. Theorist Brent Ryan Bellamy illuminates the political unconscious of post-apocalyptic writing, drawing on a range of disciplinary fields, including science fiction studies, American studies, energy humanities research, and critical race theory. From George R. Stewart's Earth Abides to N.K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season, Remainders of the American Century describes the tension between a reactionary impulse and the progressive impetus for a new world.

Brent Ryan Bellamy teaches courses on critical worldbuilding, graphic fiction, American petrocultures, and science fiction at Trent University. He has published work in Canadian Review of American Studies, The Cormac McCarthy Journal, Mediations, Open Library of the Humanities, Paradoxa, Postmodern Culture, Resilience, Science Fiction Studies, Western American Literature, and several edited collections. He has edited journal special issues on energy humanities, resource aesthetics, and science fiction and the climate crisis and two books, Materialism and the Critique of Energy (MCM' Publishing) and An Ecotopian Lexicon (University of Minnesota Press). His book Remainders of the American Century: Post-Apocalyptic Novels in the Age of US Decline is available from Wesleyan University Press.

Brent Ryan Bellamy's profile page

"Brent Ryan Bellamy's Remainders of the American Century is a sustained and provocative engagement with the post-apocalyptic as a mode of expression. Beyond the categorizing imperative of the post-apocalyptic as a genre, the post-apocalyptic as a mode allows us to see its flexibility across time and its power in the world, its capacity to mediate different anxieties at different historical moments, and its ability to shape how people think about and respond to those anxieties. The post-apocalyptic genre is all too often considered to be post- or apolitical. Through the lens of the post-apocalyptic mode, however, Bellamy uncovers in the post-1945 literary archive 'a layered stratigraphy of cultural and political contests over the transforming meanings of apocalypse and survival'"?Jessica Hurley, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment

"[Remainders of the American Century] balances depth with breadth to canvass seventy years of writing and history without being too general or abstract. Any scholar of the American hegemony would benefit from reading this work, but especially those interested in the post-apocalyptic mode."?Ezekiel Crago, Fantastika Review