The Ethics of Survival in Contemporary Literature and Culture delves into the complex problems involved in all attempts to survive. The essays analyze survival in contemporary prose narratives, short stories, poems, dramas, and theoretical texts, but also in films and other modes of cultural practices. Addressing  diverse topics such as memory and forgetting in Holocaust narratives, stories of refugees and asylum seekers, and representations of war, the ethical implications involved in survival in texts and media are brought into a transnational critical discussion. The volume will be of potential interest to a wide range of critics working on ethical issues, the body, and the politics of art and literature.

1. Survival: An Introductory Essay.- Part I. Survival and the Group.- 2. The Visibility of Survival: Even the Dogs and Jon McGregor’s Ethics of Attention.- 3. “Survivors all”: Affirmative Connections in Novels by Julian Barnes and Caryl Phillips.- 4. Feats of Survival: Refugee Writing and the Ethics of Representation.- 5. Surviving Trauma in the Female Neo-slave Narrative: Sara Collins’s Neo-gothicThe Confessions of Frannie Langton.- Part II. Survival and the Individual.- 6. “That was what all men became: techniques for survival”: The Paradoxical Notion of Survival in Julian Barnes’sThe Noise of Time.- 7. Vulnerability, Empathy, and the Ethics of Survival in Graham Swift’sWish You Were Here.- 8. Stories of Dis-ease: Ethics and Survival in Dementia Narratives.- 9. Surviving: Jenny Diski, Illness, and Gratitude.- 10. Environmental Ethics of Survival: Case Study Analysis ofI am Legend and The Revenant.- Part III Survival and the Holocaust.- 11. Close Reading of a Title: OnSurvival in Auschwitz.- 12. Narrative Closure and the “Whew” Effect: The Ethics of Reading Narratives of Survival of the Holocaust.- 13. With All the Force of Literalness: Ruth Klüger’s Survivor Testimonies in Erwin Leiser’s We Were Ten Brothers and Thomas Mitscherlich’sJourneys into Life.- 14. “The Four Brothers”: Claude Lanzmann’s War Refugee Board Interviews.