Current PhD Students

Caitlin Fisher

Thesis Title:

‘Stillness in the Ceaselessness’: Temporality in Pandemic Quarantine

Literature via Contemporary Science Fiction and Fantasy

Supervisor:

Dr Pritika Pradhan & Professor David Stirrup

Description:

My joint creative and critical project seeks to define contemporary post-COVID-19 “lockdown literature”—a phrase I would like to use and redefine for my own purposes from Brigid Delaney’s article “Why Did Covid Disappear from Our Collective Consciousness so Quickly?” in The Guardian, to describe books that seek to portray the experience of isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic— specifically examining the new genre’s relationship to time. I advocate that it is not in the genre of literary realism but rather in contemporary science fiction and fantasy novels written post-2020. Science fiction and fantasy genre conventions permit experimentations with nonlinear timelines that literary realism does not, while also granting readers an understanding of how a pandemic or quarantine isolation affected our lives without forcibly re-establishing the reader in the claustrophobic and potentially traumatic details from March 2020 to March 2021. I argue that certain recent novels demonstrate how the COVID lockdown provided both a space for imagination and escapism even during isolation and illness. I argue that in COVID quarantine, it is the distortion and fluidity of time in these spaces that facilitates creative expression.