Climate change in literature and literary criticism

Abstract

Abstract:This article provides an overview of climate change in literature, focusing on the representation of climate change in Anglophone fiction. It then evaluates the way in which these fictional representations are critiqued in literary studies, and considers the extent to which the methods and tools that are currently employed are adequate to this new critical task. We explore how the complexity of climate change as both scientific and cultural phenomenon demands a corresponding degree of complexity in fictional representation. For example, when authors represent climate change as a global, networked, and controversial phenomenon, they move beyond simply employing the environment as a setting and begin to explore its impact on plot and character, producing unconventional narrative trajectories and innovations in characterization. Then, such creative complexity asks of literary scholars a reassessment of methods and approaches. For one thing, it may require a shift in emphasis from literary fiction to genre fiction. It also particularly demands that environmental criticism, or ecocriticism, moves beyond its long-standing interest in concepts of 'nature' and 'place', to embrace a new understanding of the local in relation to the global. We suggest, too, that there are synergies to be forged between these revisionary moves in ecocriticism and developments in literary critical theory and historicism, as these critical modes begin to deal with climate change and reimagine themselves in turn.Climate change now occupies a primary position not just on political and scientific agendas but in the wider cultural imagination. Just five years ago, Robert Macfarlane bemoaned the dearth of creative response to climate change, asking, 'Where are the novels, the plays, the

Narratives in climate change discourse

“…Maintaining that the notion of narrative has often been used in a noncritical way, we propose to analyze what we call ‘climate change narratives’ according to the classical structure of a narrative, with five main components: initial situation , complication , reactions , resolution , and final situation (be it positive or negative for one or several actors), which may be accompanied by an overarching moral . Our focus will be on nonfictional texts, but we observe similar approaches to the complex phenomenon of climate change being undertaken in literature and literary criticism where ‘the complexity of climate change as both scientific and cultural phenomenon demands a corresponding degree of complexity in fictional representation’ (Ref , p. 185). Johns‐Putra has investigated how the popularity of climate change in fiction has developed, contributing to new concepts such as cli‐fi (climate change fiction), climate change plays, novels, and poetry.…”

Narrating climate futures: shared socioeconomic pathways and literary fiction

“…In parallel with the modelling community's narratives for alternative futures of societal development, a wide range of literary representations of a future world in which climate change comes to matter have emerged in the last decade (Trexler and Johns-Putra 2011;Trexler 2015;Johns-Putra 2016;Kaplan 2016). There is now a wealth of literary fiction addressing various topics in multiple genres, from post-apocalyptic narratives of highly unequal societies and dystopian visions of a bio-based economy to intimate stories of daily life in a warming and carbon-constrained world.…”

These Overheating Worlds

“…I argue that a feminist geographical approach highlights the ways in which some arguments about the importance of the utopian impulse (Jameson 2005) are grounded in particular assumptions about the nature of radical difference. Furthermore, such an approach amplifies calls for ecocritical analyses grounded in a "political theory of nature" that is alive to the material inequalities and oppressions that are coconstitutive of nature-society relations (Smith 1996, 49; see also Castree and Braun 1998;Trexler and Johns-Putra 2011).…”