This book examines how Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World represent groundbreaking milestones in British apocalyptic literature, urging readers to recognize their lasting significance and influence. It illustrates how developments in science and technology from 1818 to 1932 bring humanity closer to a fictional apocalypse. Using this idea as a starting point, this book discusses how the hubris inherent in individuals pursuing scientific and technological advancements in the name of perfection is a mere pretext under which the true power dynamics are hidden, ultimately leading to an inescapable apocalypse. In these novels, the potential for apocalypse is revealed through the ‘mad scientist’ trope, which is closely tied to advancements in science and technology. It is this trope that accelerates the impending apocalypse through uncontrollable scientific experiments or a deep yearning for absolute power, both of which are what totalitarian ideologies require. In either case, at the core of these concerns lies one central idea that this book emphasises— the renunciation of humanity’s security and peace in exchange for much power by the powerful.

Drawing on recent posthumanist theories that promote a non-anthropocentric perspective, this study examines the works of contemporary British poets Mario Petrucci and Alice Oswald. It is argued that their poetry can be described as posthuman poetry, which envisions posthuman spaces of becoming where human and nonhuman worlds coexist on a non-hierarchical basis. Petrucci’s engagement with ecocritical crises in the Anthropocene underscores the limits of human agency, and it foregrounds destructive impact of human actions on the ecosystem. In a posthuman context, therefore, Petrucci problematises the human/nonhuman binary by representing the erosion of the anthropocentric worldview in the face of environmental crises such as deforestation, global warming, and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Bosco (1999), Heavy Water: A Poem for Chernobyl (2004) and Half Life: Poems for Chernobyl (2004). In these collections, challenging the perception of nonhuman matter as passive, Petrucci emphasises the agency of trees and radioactive particles. Similarly, Alice Oswald moves the reader beyond the human-centred treatment of the natural world. Rejecting human exceptionalism, Oswald’s Dart (2002) presents a polyphonic meshwork where the voices of alternating human speakers and the River Dart interweave within a posthuman space. Representing the intersubjective and dialogic exchanges between the human and nonhuman inhabitants of the Severn Estuary and the lunar cycle, Oswald’s A Sleepwalk on the Severn (2009) further problematises the subject/object binary by creating a posthuman space of becoming grounded in a communicative framework. Hence, bringing Petrucci and Oswald together, this study draws attention to trans-corporeal and polyphonic entanglements of human-nonhuman, subject-object and self-other non-binaries, and it aims to show how poetry, as a literary medium, can contribute to questioning and transforming the anthropocentric vision of humankind in the contemporary world.