Narrating Nuclear Disaster: Literary Form after Chornobyl and Fukushima

Examining literature in the aftermath of Chornobyl and Fukushima, this book considers literary genres and forms as important resources for understanding the material, environmental and social fallout of nuclear disasters. In a field that remains scientifically contested and, in the current moment of climate breakdown, highly politicized, Narrating Nuclear Disasters offers literature as an arena for exploring the uncertainty arising from events whose short- and long-term effects remain hard to oversee. By reading a wide corpus of post-Chornobyl and post-Fukushima literature from canonical texts by Christa Wolf, Julian Barnes and Ruth Ozeki to genre fiction such as thrillers and travelogues, the book offers a new way of thinking about nuclear narratives and nuclear culture more broadly. In doing so, it positions nuclear disaster narratives within a wider context of “Anthropocene literature”, forging new connections between nuclear culture and contemporary ecocriticism.