The Mechanism of Survival in Post-Apocalyptic Pandemic Narratives: A Comparative Study
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17507/tpls.1404.31Keywords:
pandemic, survival, Post-Apocalypse, Station Eleven, The Free ZoneAbstract
Post-Apocalyptic Fiction is a subgenre of science fiction in which a global crisis takes its toll on the human population, leaving only a few with the luck of surviving the scene. However, survival slowly develops into a determining power as the remaining people try to reconstruct a new civilization with the use of different strategies and mechanisms of survival. This study is then based on post-apocalyptic texts, particularly ones that are concerned with pandemics, and carefully examines and compares two ground-breaking narratives of post-apocalyptic fiction: Stephen King’s The Stand (1978) and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014). It attempts to explore the two narratives in terms of the strategies and mechanisms of survival as the two novelists recapture the survivors’ experiences and their struggle to survive the ongoing post-apocalyptic setting.
References
Abdullah, Neval Nabil Mahmoud. (2021). “Revisiting the Pandemic: Salvaging Hope and Capturing the Essence of Life in Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven”. Journal of Scientific Research in Arts, Language and Literature, 1, 100-134.
Bellwoar, Hannah, Daniel Dries and Donna Weimer. (2016, October 24). “Station Eleven: A Panel Discussion”. Juniata College. Retrieved November 20, 2021 from https://www.juniata.edu/offices/juniata-voices/media/volume- HYPERLINK “https://www.juniata.edu/offices/juniata-voices/media/volume-17/vol17-BellwoarDriesWeimer.pdf”17.
Bergeron, Patrick. (2019). “The Art of Not Dying: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel and Oscar De Profundis by Catherin Mavrikakis.” In Canadian Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror, edited by Amy J. Ransom & Dominick Grace. Springer, 101-116.
Cassuto, Leonard. (1992). “The “Power of Blackness” in The Stand.” In A Case Study of the Stand. Edited by Anthony Magistrale. Washington: Wildside Press.
Collings, Michael R. (2006). The Many Facets of Stephen King. Maryland: Wildside Press.
Chute, Hilary. (2016). Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics and Documentary Form. The Belknap Press, 2016.
Curtis, Claire P. (2010). Postapocalyptic Fiction and the Social Contract: “We’ll not Go Home Again. Pennsylvania: Lexington Books.
De Cristofaro, Diletta. (2019). The Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Novel: Critical Temporalities and the End Times. Bloomsbury.
Feldner, Maximilian. (2018). “‘Survival is Insufficient’: The Postapocalyptic Imagination of Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven.” Anglican: An International Journal of English Studies, 165-179.
Hicks, Heather J. (2016). The Post-Apocalyptic Novel in the Twenty-First Century: Modernity Beyond Salvage. New York: Springer.
Kabak, Murat. (2021). “The Post-Apocalyptic Aesthetics of Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven.” Apocalyptic Visions in the Anthropocene and the Rise of Climate Fiction, edited by Kubra Baysal. Cambridge Scholars, 201-212.
King, Stephen. (2020).The Stand: Complete and Uncut Edition. London: Hodder and Stoughton.
Leggatt, Matthew. (2018). “‘Another World Just out of Sight’: Remembering or Imagining Utopia in Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven.” Open Library of Humanities, 4(8), 1-23.
Mandel, Emily St. John. (2015). Station Eleven. Picador.
Magistrale, Anthony. (2006). The Moral Voyages of Stephen King. Maryland: Wildside Press.
Miller, Herbert Adolphus. (1921). “The Group as an Instinct.” The University of Chicago Press, 27(1), 334-343.
Morris, Stuart Allen. (2001). “Morality in the American West: The Origins of Evil in Stephen King’s The Stand and Desperation.” Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects. Retrieved May 26, 2021 from https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_chanhonoproj/481.
Pharr, Mary. (1992). “Almost Better: Surviving the Plague in Stephen King’s The Stand. “ In A Case Study of the Stand. Edited by Anthony Magistrale. Washington: Wildside Press.
Ratto, Cassey. (2017). “Brick Houses with Glass Foundations: The Failure Points of Post-Apocalyptic Nationalism” in Apocalyptic Chic: Visions of the Apocalypse and Post-Apocalypse in Literature and Visual Arts. Edited by Barbara Brodman and James E. Doan. Maryland: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
Reddish, Mitchell G. (1990). Apocalyptic Literature: A Reader. Massachusetts: Hendrikson Publishers.
Shakespeare, William. King Lear. (1994). Wordsworth Classics.
Smith, Philip. (2016). “Shakespeare, Survival, and the Seeds of Civilisation in Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven.” Extrapolation, 57(3), 289-295.
Stifflemire, Brett Samuel. (2017). “Visions of After the End: A History and Theory of the Post-Apocalyptic Genre in Literature and Film.” [A Dissertation, The University of Alabama].
The Editors of Britannica. (2018, December 7). Gospel According to John. In Britannica. Retrieved October 11, 2021 from https://www.britannica.com/topic/Gospel-According-to-John.
Vermeulen, Pieter. (2018). “Beauty That Must Die: Station Eleven, Climate Change Fiction, and the Life of Form.” Studies in the Novel, 50(1), 9-25.
Wampler, Scott. (2020, December 14). “The 5 Most Challenging Parts of Adapting The Stand.” Polygon. Retrieved May 30, 2022 from https://www.polygon.com/tv/2020/12/14/22166329/the-stand-adapting-stephen-king-2020-cbs-new-ending.
Watkins, Susan. (2020). Contemporary Women’s Post-Apocalyptic Fiction. Springer.
