Social Reproduction at the End of Times: Jenni Fagan’s and John Burnside’s Degrowth Imaginaries

This article will explore how degrowth imaginaries inform the representation of social reproduction and environmental collapse in Jenni Fagan&#8217;s <i>The Sunlight Pilgrims</i> (2016) and John Burnside&#8217;s <i>Havergey</i> (2017). It will argue that the two novel...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Arianna Introna
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2019-05-01
Series:Humanities
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/8/2/104
Description
Summary:This article will explore how degrowth imaginaries inform the representation of social reproduction and environmental collapse in Jenni Fagan&#8217;s <i>The Sunlight Pilgrims</i> (2016) and John Burnside&#8217;s <i>Havergey</i> (2017). It will argue that the two novels deploy the trope of the end of times to frame the unravelling of the world-ecology that binds capital and nature together in the Capitalocene, according to Jason Moore. They suggest that this is what makes possible, and necessary, a re-organisation of social reproduction and of the patterns of energy consumption or generation with which this is entangled. The first part of this article will examine the metabolic rift with which <i>The Sunlight Pilgrims</i> and <i>Havergey</i> are concerned, while the second part will delineate the ways in which degrowth imaginaries frame the representation of reorganised forms of social (re-)production. Drawing on disability studies and situating <i>The Sunlight Pilgrims</i> and <i>Havergey</i> within the disciplinary framework of Scottish literature, I will continue to consider how Burnside&#8217;s and Fagan&#8217;s novels feature narratives of disability and the nation. These may come across as marginal to the plot but function as the foci through which the politics of the degrowth communities represented come to the fore.
ISSN:2076-0787