In parallel with five new scientific scenarios of alternative societal developments (shared socioeconomic pathways, SSPs), a wide range of literary representations of a future world in which climate change comes to matter have emerged in the last decade. Both kinds of narrative are important forms of Bworld-making.^This article initiates a conversation between science and literature through situating, relating, and comparing contemporary climate change fiction to the five SSPs. A parallel reading of the SSPs and the novels provides the means to make links between larger societal trends and personal accounts of climate change. The article shows how literary fiction creates engagement with climate change through particular accounts of agency and focalized perspectives in a different way than how the factors important to challenges of mitigation and adaptation are narrated in the SSPs. Through identification with the protagonists in literary fiction, climate futures become close and personal rather than distant and abstract.
The four books in this limited series are an outcome of a major Swedish research project called 'Cosmopolitan-Vernacular Dynamics in World Literatures' , the aim of which has been to intervene -not least methodologically -in the current disciplinary development of world literature studies. The series is united by a common introductory chapter and approaches the vernacular in world literature across a range of fields, such as comparative literature, postcolonial literature and literary anthropology.
In the renowned and epoch-making working-class novels from the Swedish 1930s, claims for social and economic justice reflect a local struggle with distinctly national and cosmopolitan significance. Generally, these novels can be described as having local characters and settings, national narrative perspectives, and cosmopolitan plots, but a closer look reveals a much more varied picture. There is, in fact, no general tendency of geo-cultural dynamics in this historically distinct literary current. When the novels are translated into English, however, a more distinct pattern occurs: regional embeddedness is considerably weakened in the translation process, leaving room for much stronger national ties and a more extensive cosmopolitan significance.
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