American Nightmares: Dystopia in Twenty-First-Century US Fiction in Bloomington, MN

«Valentina Romanzi’s study is a welcome addition to the body of scholarship on dystopia, utopia science fiction, and speculative fiction. It provides a comprehensive and updated review of the complex and rich debate on the question of genres and subgenres, while at the same time offering a fresh perspective. Eloquent and very well written, this volume reveals America’s fascination with catastrophic future scenarios, including the post-apocalyptic, delving into the issues that surround critical dystopia, progress, hope and fear. The close readings offer lucid, insightful interpretations of texts that range from SF literary ancestor, Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
to Margaret Atwood’s award winning
The Testaments
, sequel to the acclaimed
The
Handmaid’s Tale
.»
(Eleonora Rao, Università degli Studi di Salerno)
This volume investigates dystopia in twenty-first-century US fiction. Using a methodological framework based on sociology, it theorizes a correlation between the crisis of the Frontier myth and of American exceptionalism and a renewed interest in dystopian worlds.
Part One illustrates the methodological framework, exploring the concept of dystopia, offering an overview of the American myths and of their current status and spotlighting some relevant sociological theories.
Part Two applies the proposed methodological framework to four texts, investigating the sub-genres of political, technological and environmental dystopia. The primary works, chosen to show both the relevance of the abovementioned American myths to dystopian narratives and the pervasiveness of the genre across the media, are Margaret Atwood’s
Testaments
(2019), Dave Eggers’s
The Circle
(2013), David Cage’s video game
Detroit: Become Human
(2018), and the Hughes Brothers’ 2010 movie
The Book of Eli
.