Of Whales and Mushrooms: Anna Tsing’s and John Ironmonger’s Polyphonic Storytelling

Abstract Growing discontent with the ideological formations of Hobbesian self-interest and capitalist progress narratives are countered in Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015) and John Ironmonger’s The Whale at the End of the World ([2015] 2021) through the use of Bakhtinian polyphony which textually manifests collaborative survival. The converging narrative strategies of these books reshape the fiction/non-fiction boundary from opposite ends of the literature/science writing spectrum.