Project description

The ruins of the recent past have recently received increased attention worldwide, as seen in proliferating images of post-industrial Detroit, new pilgrimages to Chernobyl, and the documentation of post-Soviet architectural remains. The corpus of environmental fiction and poetry depicting modern ruins has grown accordingly, but remains under-studied. While considerable research has been devoted to literary ruins in earlier periods, the current moment is underexplored and commands urgent scholarly attention, especially in the context of environmental studies. This project examines urban ruins in contemporary writing, showing that literary depictions of ruins can form an important part of a text’s ecological work. The project’s scholarly contribution is threefold. First, it contributes to the interdisciplinary understanding of the current global preoccupation with modern ruins. Second, the project deepens scholarship on key modern writers whose environmental texts include ruins: Margaret Atwood, Cormac McCarthy, Derek Mahon and Judith Wright. Third, in reading modern ruin depictions as a form of caution to the reader, the project contributes to research on the study of the text as form of environmental warning.