The Postworld In-Between Utopia and Dystopia: Intersectional, Feminist, and Non-Binary Approaches in 21st Century Speculative Literature and Culture

This collection of essays offers global perspectives on feminist utopia and dystopia in speculative literature, film, and art, working from a range of intersectional approaches to examine key works and genres in both their specific cultural context and a wider, global, epistemological, critical background.

The international, diverse contributions, including a Foreword by Gregory Claeys, draw upon posthumanism, speculative realism, speculative feminism, object-oriented ontology, new materialisms, and post-Anthropocene studies to propose alternative perspectives on gender, environment, as well as alternate futures and pasts rendered in fiction. Instead of binary divisions into utopia vs dystopia, the collection explores genres transcending this dichotomy, scrutinising the oeuvre of both established and emerging writers, directors, and critics.

This is a rich and unique collection suitable for scholars and students studying feminist literature, media cultural studies, and women’s and gender studies.

Tomasz Fisiak is Assistant Professor in the Department of British Literature and Culture, Institute of English Studies, University of Lodz. His book She-(d)evils? The Construction of a Female Tyrant as a Cultural Critique was published in 2020 by Peter Lang. His academic interests include Gothic fiction/cinema, gender/queer/feminist issues, dys/utopian fiction, and popular/pulp culture. He is a member of the editorial team of Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture. He is currently a team member of the project Word, Sound and Image: Intertextuality in Music Videos no. 2019/33/B/HS2/00131 financed by National Science Centre in Poland.

Katarzyna Ostalska is Associate Professor in the Department of British Literature and Culture at the University of Lodz, Poland. She is the head of the Posthumanities Research Centre at the Faculty of Philology, University of Lodz. She holds a PhD and postdoctoral degree (habilitation) in literature. Her research includes contemporary British and Irish literature and culture, particularly Irish women poets, gender studies, posthumanism, speculative fiction, animal studies, ecofeminism, and film studies. Her post-doctoral monograph Towards Female Empowerment―The New Generation of Irish Women Poets: Vona Groarke, Sinéad Morrissey, Caitríona O’Reilly, and Mary O’Donoghue was published in 2015. She co-edited two collections of essays and a journal’s special issue on speculative fiction (2020).