Domesticating the Apocalypse: Motherhood and the Novel at the End of Time

This dissertation engages with a pressing question in literary studies: as humans appear to be increasingly insignificant in light of a planetary, ecological crisis, how can the novel, long described as the literary conduit of the bourgeois individual, be understood as relevant? In studying the “slow violence” of climate change, critics tend to zoom out to the cosmic scale. Feminist eco-theorist Claire Colebrook, for example, has proclaimed that there will be a time “when the human species might be read as a scar on an earth in which ‘man’ is no longer present.” This idea has prompted contemporary literary theorists like Timothy Clark and Amitav Ghosh to revive a question T.S. Eliot asked in the 1920s: is the novel is a dead form? Domesticating the Apocalypse responds to this question by delineating a hitherto unidentified subgenre of twenty-first-century American fiction, what I call the “apocalyptic domestic novel.” This dissertation argues that these new novels revise the tradition of domestic fiction as a way of managing the existential threat posed by climate change. In 1957, Ian Watt argued that the first domestic novels, written in the epistolary form, were distinguished by their focus on the minutiae of everyday life. These novels, Watt argued, allow the reader “inside [the characters’] minds as well as inside their houses.” Domesticating the Apocalypse shows that the novelists I examine, who portray their characters as lost in planetary disarray, revive literary domestication to produce a narrative conduit back into houses--and thus back into private consciousness. The novelistic subject in these novels thus marks validation of human life rather than capitulation to bourgeois ideals. I argue that the return to apparently trivial human concerns in revitalizing the domestic is a crucial form of cultural repair in a moment when the local seems to be overwhelmed by the cosmic.Doctor of Philosoph