Abstract
As a major invisible global threat, COVID-19 has become one of the major subject matters in contemporary fiction. At this point, while Lawrence Wright puts emphasis on the significance of global solidarity to combat coronavirus in his novel, The End of October (2020), Christina Sweeney-Baird reinterprets COVID-19 from a futuristic point of view, envisaging a post-pandemic world order dominated by women, with men’s death due to a lethal virus showing its effects all over the world in her debut novel, The End of Men (2022). Different from these works, The Mother Code (2020) by Carole Stivers presents an apocalyptical world dominated by robotic mothers for their success in the adaptation to the circumstances determined by the pandemic caused by IC-NAN virus, leading to the death of human parents due to their failure in adjustment to the conditions of the pandemic. Problematising the meaning of motherhood, Stivers’ debut novel offers reading in terms of Darwin’s theory of “Natural Selection”, hence offering an innovative insight into the projection of COVID-19 in contemporary literary canon.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Carole Stivers, The Mother Code, Darwin, Pandemic, Artificial Intelligence
