About this issue
The contributions contained in this volume address ways in which scarcity (and abundance) have been represented aesthetically and exploited politically in very different contexts, from literary texts to computer games, and from Enlightenment visions of plenty to colonial justifications for famine. The range of examples shown here give some idea of the productivity of “scarcity” as a concept, and the many forms it can take in influencing and absorbing human ideas about our ways of inhabiting the world.
How to cite: Felcht, Frederike, and Katie Ritson (eds.), “The Imagination of Limits: Exploring Scarcity and Abundance,” RCC Perspectives 2015, no. 2. doi.org/10.5282/rcc/7141.
Content
- Foreword by Frederike Felcht and Katie Ritson
- The Aesthetics and Politics of Scarcity—A Swedish Example by Frederike Felcht
Spaces of Scarcity
- British Views on the Indian and Ottoman Famines: Politics, Culture, and Morality by Özge Ertem
- Scarcity in the Arctic: A Colonial Construct? by Karen Oslund
- Environmental Scarcity and Abundance in Medieval Icelandic Literature by Reinhard Hennig
- “Main Objective: Don’t Starve”: Representations of Scarcity in Virtual Worlds by Robert Baumgartner
Stories of Lack and Abundance
- Anthropocene Blues: Abundance, Energy, Limits by Fredrik Albritton Jonsson
- Curb Your Enthusiasm: On Scarcity and Replenishment in Literature by Klaus Benesch
- “Hang on to the words”: The Scarcity of Language in McCarthy’s The Road and Atwood’s Oryx and Crake by Oliver Völker
- From Anti-Abundance to Anti-Anti-Abundance: Scarcity, Abundance, and Utopia in Two Science Fiction Writers by J. Jesse Ramírez
