Eleven is part of a widely-discussed, growing corpus of post-apocalyptic novels written by authors who do not typically write science fiction. 1 In what Andrew Hoberek (2011) identifies as the genre turn of contemporary fiction, the post-apocalyptic 'genre has moved from the margins (tacky science-fiction) into the mainstream (legitimate, widely-recognized and practiced speculative fiction)' (Buell 2013: 9), so much so that Frederick Buell frames it as a ' cultural dominant'. 2 As Andrew Tate puts it, ' contemporary narrative is haunted by dreams of a future that is a place of ruin' (2017: 2). It is in the context of what Heather J. Hicks, in her study of the twenty-firstcentury post-apocalyptic novel, discusses as an 'unprecedented outpouring of fully developed post-apocalyptic narratives by major, critically acclaimed anglophone [sic] writers' (2016: 5-6) that my article situates Station Eleven. Like Hicks, I argue that the contemporary post-apocalyptic novel ' addresses the nature of modernity' (2016: 4); unlike Hicks, I argue that these fictions do so to critique, rather than to salvage, modernity, and specifically, to critique the apocalyptic understanding of time underlying Western modernity through what I term critical temporalities. Indeed, as opposed to analyses of the contemporary apocalyptic imagination that interrogate its relationship with the current socio-historical conjuncture's traumas and risks, 1 For the sake of simplicity, in what follows ' contemporary post-apocalyptic novel' refers to the subject of this article, post-apocalyptic fictions written by non-SF authors. In addition to the texts discussed in my article, other examples of this growing body of twenty-first-century writings include:
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