The United Nations refugee agency – UNHCR – released a report in 2012 which argued that displacement, predominately caused by war, is ‘the new twenty-first century challenge’ (UNHCR Global Trends). Through the perspective of a vulnerable and …
View More Displaced PerspectiveTag: contemporary literature
Litter, Landscape and The Road
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) presents a dystopian vision of a near-future world in which most organic vegetation has died and human life is becoming increasingly rare. It is not unusual for dystopian fiction to …
View More Litter, Landscape and The RoadReconsidering Quarantine in Invasion Narratives
The academic and public interest in supernatural invasion narratives has increased exponentially in the 20th and 21st centuries. According to Terrence Rafferty of The New York Times, the fascination with the zombie apocalypse …
View More Reconsidering Quarantine in Invasion NarrativesThe Legitimacy of Literary Opinion
The influences of cyberspace have been decried as the death of literature as we know it, the death of the book, and now also as the death of the critic. The changes introduced by the Internet in the production and reception of literature …
View More The Legitimacy of Literary OpinionThe Thoughts in our Head: A World
The early years of the twenty-first century have seen—among its various issues and events—the beginnings of a global assimilation of the recognition…
View More The Thoughts in our Head: A WorldGordon Burn and Mrs T
One of the strangest, and most recurrent, observations about Margaret Thatcher’s funeral was the number of celebrity mourners, including, but not limited to, Katherine Jenkins, Joan Collins, Jeremy Clarkson, Terry Wogan and Shirley Bassey…
View More Gordon Burn and Mrs TThe Third Reich in Contemporary Fiction
What voice is suitable to describe the horrors of the Third Reich? From whose perspective should the catastrophic events be narrated? What is the relationship, in such…
View More The Third Reich in Contemporary FictionHuman Nature: Pastoral in the Anthropocene
With the proposition that we are now living in the Anthropocene – the geological epoch defined by human activities and their effects – the conditions of the pastoral are placed under unprecedented threat, and at the same time, they can be seen to be given new significance.
View More Human Nature: Pastoral in the AnthropoceneOn Nuclear Criticism
In 1984, the journal Diacritics set out to define what it labelled as the developing academic terrain of ‘nuclear criticism’. The opening section of the journal entitled…
View More On Nuclear CriticismEditors’ Introduction: Issue 1.1
Welcome to the launch issue of Alluvium, a new online journal of literary criticism that is dedicated to 21st-century writing as well as 21st-century approaches…
View More Editors’ Introduction: Issue 1.1