Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2017 -

In this nuanced, thought-provoking work, Wallace (Queen's Univ., Canada) brings together ecocriticism, nuclear criticism, and sociological approaches to risk in order to propose a critical approach that engages with the complex and multifaceted nature of modern global/environmental threat. Straddling the "fabulous" literary focus of nuclear criticism and the emphasis on the "real" in early ecocriticism, the author maps out strategies for examining risk in an era in which neither risk nor literature is easily quarantined for examination. Working to bridge this apparent gap between literature and the "real," Wallace centers each chapter on a different category of global threat, bringing a broad range of literary genres (including film and graphic narrative) into conversation with history, current developments, and speculative theory. Though more exploratory than exhaustive, as Wallace herself notes, Risk Criticism does important work in modeling methods for engaging profitably with both the problematic concept of risk "management" and the imaginative discourses that arise from and inform understanding of global threat.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.