Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1: Deindustrialisation and the Selfish Gene
Gene and Strike
Overpopulation and Whiteness: Doris Lessing’s The Memoirs of a
Survivor
Brackets and Choice: Samuel Delany’s Trouble on Triton
Chapter 2: Cultivating Dreamworlds
Mutual Aid
Cultivating Humans
The Fifth Problem: Boris and Arkady Strugatsky’s Roadside
Picnic
Genogeography: Kir Bulychev’s “Another’s Memory”
Chapter 3: Memoir and the Laboratory
Metaphors of the Human Genome Project
Welfare, Profit, and the Vitruvian Man
Ending Development: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go
Algorithmic Governmentality in Andrew Niccols’s Gattaca
Chapter 4: Speculative Ancestry
Ancestry Making
Genre, Genetics, and Genealogy
Henrietta Lacks and Stolen Flesh
Reparation, Romance, and Kinlessness
Leaving: Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother
Staying: Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing
Chapter 5: Toxic Infrastructure
Chernobyl and the Postgenomic Condition
Adaptation, Improvisation, and Epigenetics
Mutation and Fragmentation: Svetlana Alexievich’s Chernobyl
Prayer
Transitional Characterisation: Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach
trilogy
Conclusion: Disappearance, community, characterisation, genre, and
scale
Works Cited
Index
Charts the impact of genetic science on literature, culture and our understanding of what it means to be human.
Lara Choksey is a Research Fellow at the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health at the University of Exeter, UK.
Imbued throughout with deep concern for the peripheral, the
possible, and the political … What emerges as most compelling out
of this entire tapestry of readings is the author's interpretation
of the limits and failures of the extraordinary ‘cultural power of
the genome.'
*Science*
Intellectually rich and rewarding, this study ranges effortlessly
across the fields of biology, socio-economic theory and philosophy,
drawing on these perspectives to forge novel readings of a range of
literary texts. Imaginative and astute in its reflections on genre
and narrative form, it is beautifully written throughout. The
argument is bold and original, grounded in rigorous research and
always attentive to the specific biosocial contexts it
explores.
*Professor Clare Hanson, University of Southampton, UK*
Narrative in the Age of the Genome: Genetic Worlds offers a robust
commentary on a broad range of compelling speculative fictions and
nonfictions and makes a compelling case for the role of narratives
as a critical aspect of emerging biotechnologies and genomics.
*The British Society for Literature and Science*
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