Current PhD Students

Megan Woodward

Thesis Title

Reimagined, rejected, removed: Children and Childhood in Contemporary British Dystopian Fiction, 1992-2021

Supervisor

Dr Bryan Radley

Description

My project is motivated by the friction between two similarly potent but diametrically opposed sentiments that arise from political, cultural and artistic visualisations of the future in contemporary Britain. On the one hand, the velocity of advancements in science and technology, especially in the fields of biotechnology and Artificial Intelligence (AI), and the ever-growing threat of climate catastrophe, pose urgent questions about the viability of human survival, or at least the survival of the human in its traditional form. Both of these phenomena generate an emergent need to distinguish between the future and the future of the human, or, in other words, to recognise both the place of posthuman beings in our future and the independent temporalities of the natural environment, the planet, even the cosmos within which humanity resides. On the other hand, there exists a centuries-old figure that stands in for the inevitable and immutable continuation of humanity: the Child. This figure is persistently invoked both politically and culturally, often implying that human survival will naturally prevail over the challenges posed by new technologies and climate crisis. I explore the uneasy relationship between the threatened human future and Child-centred futurity through close readings of five contemporary British dystopian novels that incorporate both: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) and Klara and the Sun (2021); Ian McEwan’s Solar (2010); P. D. James’s The Children of Men (1992); and Megan Hunter’s The End We Start From (2017), as well as film adaptations of all but Solar. These texts occupy the discursive space between the future and the human future, and create a critical opportunity to consider how the threatened human future and Child-oriented futurity, as opposite poles of future-thought, influence and challenge one another, and test the potentialities and limitations of their coexistence in the context of the contemporary moment. Approaching utopia/dystopia as genre whose historical evolution has responded to developments in popular perceptions of temporality, my project demarcates a contemporary era of British dystopian fiction—distinctly post-neoliberal and unfolding at the ‘end of history’—that confronts an increasingly precarious futurism and provides a discourse to navigate this precarity.

My PhD builds on my MA research project, which examined the politics of childhood in McEwan’s fiction. This project investigated lost, misrepresented, and forgotten children, the inner child, and young people coming-of-age, all of whom are denied the ability to exist authentically in the presence of the post-neoliberal Child. I completed both my MA and BA in English Literature at the University of Leeds.