A “joke-filled romp” through end times: Radical environmentalism, deep ecology, and human extinction in Margaret Atwood’s eco-apocalyptic MaddAddam trilogy

Author:

Bouson J. Brooks1

Affiliation:

1. Loyola University Chicago, USA

Abstract

Canadian writer Margaret Atwood has spent years thinking and writing about the existential threat humanity now confronts in an era of an exponential growth in the global human population, accelerating environmental and habitat destruction, mass extinctions of plant and animal species, and ever-worsening ecological degradation. Like her 2003 novel Oryx and Crake, which Atwood describes as a “joke-filled romp through the end of the human race”, her 2009 novel The Year of the Flood and her 2013 novel MaddAddam are admonitory satires. In MaddAddam, Atwood moves forward from The Year of the Flood and Oryx and Crake as she retells and reconsiders her dystopian eco-apocalyptic account of what leads up to and what follows mass human extinction. In her account of the apocalyptic and millennial environmentalism of Crake and the God’s Gardeners, Atwood draws on the philosophy of deep ecology, and she also invokes the type of radical environmentalism embraced by activist green movements like Earth First!. Intent on environmental consciousness-raising, Atwood offers a horrific and darkly satiric account of the gruesome final days of humanity in the twenty-first century. By wryly suggesting that the remedy to humanity’s ills lies not only in interspecies cooperation but also in interspecies breeding, Atwood engages her readers in an unsettling thought experiment as Crake’s genetically modified hominoids, which are presented in Oryx and Crake as a kind of mad scientist joke, become the best hope for the genetic survival of some vestige of homo sapiens in the future Craker–human hybrid.

Publisher

SAGE Publications

Subject

Literature and Literary Theory

Reference36 articles.

Cited by 27 articles. 订阅此论文施引文献 订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献

1. Ecologies of Life: Genetics in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy;Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine;2024

2. 2 Ethics for the Future through Fiction;Edition Kulturwissenschaft;2023-06-01

3. 1 Introduction;Edition Kulturwissenschaft;2023-06-01

4. Contents;Edition Kulturwissenschaft;2023-06-01

5. Frontmatter;Edition Kulturwissenschaft;2023-06-01

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