What happens in the wake of the event? Is the event’s aftermath always characterised by the experience of disorder, fragmentation, and impermanence? Or, alternatively, can aftermath be seen as a new growth, a second crop of grass that can be sown and reaped and which gives rise to a new integrity, a new unity? The volume’s twenty-three essays by scholars from Australia, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Poland, Spain, and the United States re-visit the notion and representation of aftermath, understood here widely as a consequence/result/after-effect of a seminal event (to an individual, a community, society, regions or nations), and explore its transformative and life-changing characteristics. While acknowledging disastrous or catastrophic consequences of the event, Aftermath argues in favour of recognising some rejuvenating potential of its after-effects.

Topographies of (Post)Modernity: Studies in 20th and 21st Century Literature in English is a bilingual, English-Polish book series dedicated to publishing original research on 20th and 21st century literature in English. Monographs and collective volumes in the series address, but are not restricted to, the following research areas: literary genre studies, comparative literature, cultural poetics and transversality of ideas, as well as transnationalism of literature in English.