Schenk, Megan Marie2018-12-152018-12-152018-06https://hdl.handle.net/1794/2409965 pages. Presented to the Department of English and the Robert D. Clark Honors College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts June 2018This thesis explores presentations of motherhood during and after literary apocalypses created since the turn of the century.  I argue that writers like Margaret Atwood, Claire Watkins, Louise Erdrich, and Megan Hunter challenge traditionally masculine ideas about surviving the end of the world by highlighting the role of the mother in gesturing in the beginning of a new world. Using scholarly criticism from writers like Lee Edelman and Rebekah Sheldon, this text illuminates connections between the image of mother and child as redemption and renewed purpose, a deep entanglement with the natural world and the sublime, the interplay of religion and spirituality with ideas of beginnings and endings, the missing or insufficient father, and concern with memory and transference in the age of the Anthropocene. Each of these elements work to uncover a vision of what motherhood means both at “the end” and in the first two decades of this millennium.en-USCreative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0-USEnglishPost-Apocalyptic LiteratureMotherhoodSublimeFeminismScience FictionSpeculative FictionApocalypseThesis/Dissertation