Hope and Kinship in Contemporary Fiction

Following a comprehensive engagement with theoretical underpinnings, his close readings are meticulously crafted, offering a pleasurable reading experience. * Anglistik * [Bauer] offers a theoretically ambitious project that sustains a lucid, original, and pedantically worked-out methodology throughout its six chapters. He carefully establishes a dense yet distinctive epistemological nexus between hope, kinship, temporality, and belonging. ... Hope and Kinship covers an impressive range of subjects and material. Anyone seeking new critical interpretations on the cultural texts included in the book will find in Bauer’s analyses many useful and provocative insights. * Adrienne Mortimer, C21 Literature * This study makes use of queer theory and philosophy while focusing on an exemplary group of novels, spin-off films, and TV series. Bauer also discusses other current theoreticians, who support or challenge his argument ... While the works treated in this volume are often dark, demonstrating a prevailing cultural pessimism, Bauer emphasizes community, kinship, and hope ... Recommended for scholars in cultural studies, literary theory, and queer theory. * CHOICE * With unbounded erudition and an admirable ethical and political vision, Gero Bauer boldly rethinks the relationship between hope and kinship in our increasingly precarious contemporary world. Displaying all the hallmarks of literary studies at its best, Bauer’s book offers his readers not only an incisive exploration of recent works of fiction but also a fresh perspective on some of the most urgent theoretical debates in the humanities. * Corey McEleney, Associate Professor of English, Fordham University, USA * Gero Bauer's study is an urgent and impassioned book for and about the present. In a time of seemingly perpetual crisis, how do we maintain our faith in the future? Ranging widely across contemporary culture, and engaging always with the reality of our anxious times, Bauer finds bold imaginings of hope, solidarity, care and belonging – the very things that can make a future possible, now. * Mark Turner, Professor of Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Literature, King’s College London, UK *