Hard Frost, 1684

This paper provides a critical analysis of recent climate history (or historical climatology) scholarship. It identifies four key subfields in this historiography of climate change. First, it examines scholarship on climate reconstructions that use a variety of innovative historical sources to document past climatic conditions. Second, it analyzes scholarship on social impacts and responses to climate change. This literature is prolific with significant attention given to climatic variability and climatic or weather-related disasters. Third, the paper discusses research on the uses and abuses of climate knowledge, such as innovations in meteorology and climatology as well as ways that Western climate knowledge helped justify colonialism and perpetuate racism. Fourth, the paper examines research on cultural constructions and perceptions of climate. This includes analysis of diverse climatic understandings and climate narratives that have varied across time and space. While the climate historiography is steadily expanding and constantly probing new areas, this paper contends that the field overall would benefit from a stronger emphasis on social history to examine race, class, and gender in climate history while also focusing on how social relations and power dynamics affect human-climate interactions. Additionally, it argues that the uncovering of more diverse climate meanings and narratives, partly through better social history, could both enrich the historiography and contribute to today's broader discussions about global climate change in the past and future.

Section: Cultural Constructions and Perceptionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Cultural Constructions and Perceptionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Climate and history: a critical review of historical climatology and climate change historiography

Carey

2012

“…He finds that Shelley drew connections between climate change, social harmony, and moral perfectibility, while Malthus and Keats used the language of melancholy to critique dreams of absolute felicity and climatic engineering, and argues that the latter provide a more useful model for current environmental concerns. Snider draws on Royal Society reports, diaries, ballads, paintings, sermons, and other documents to investigate how a series of severe winters in the 17th century helped to constitute the English identity in terms of climate 130. Sudan investigates the interconnections between Enlightenment science, British colonialism, and fantasies of climate control 131.…”

Section: Literary Studies and Climate Changementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Snider draws on Royal Society reports, diaries, ballads, paintings, sermons, and other documents to investigate how a series of severe winters in the 17th century helped to constitute the English identity in terms of climate. 130 Sudan investigates the interconnections between Enlightenment science, British colonialism, and fantasies of climate control. 131 The other essays interestingly explore the historical interconnections among climate, scientific ideas, and culture in a variety of periods.…”

Section: Eco-historicismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Climate change in literature and literary criticism

Trexler

Johns‐Putra

2011

105

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

Climate change in contemporary British and Irish poetry and poetic criticism: Literary representation and environmental activism

Xie

2022

Much ink has been spilt on the study of climate change fiction (cli-fi), whereas relatively less attention has been devoted to the burgeoning growth of climate change poetry. As a sub-genre of ecopoetry which aims at dealing with realistic environmental issues and raising readers' awareness to protect the earth, climate change poetry not only represents the ongoing climatic crises in varied ways, be they realistic or imaginative, but also actively engages in provoking ecological responsibilities and environmental activism. This article is an overview of contemporary British and Irish climate change poetry and its literary criticism. Having emerged at the end of the 20th century in the United Kingdom, this poetic genre cuts across literature and environment, rising both as a prominent literary mode and an important environmental phenomenon. Interdisciplinarity, multiple topics, environmental activism, and experimentation are its primary characteristics. Current scholarship on contemporary British and Irish climate change poetry is limited and it mainly adopts theories of ecocriticism and the Anthropocene. Climate justice, poetry and activism, and comparative literary perspective are among promising avenues for the future study of this new poetic genre. Contemporary British and Irish climate change poetry, and its criticism, indicate both poets and critics' efforts to represent and, more importantly, to grapple with ongoing climate change. This article is categorized under: Trans-disciplinary Perspectives > Humanities and the Creative Arts Climate, Nature, and Ethics > Ethics and Climate Change K E Y W O R D S climate change poetry, ecocriticism, ecopoetry, environmental activism, poetic criticism 1 | INTRODUCTION Literary studies have witnessed a rise of "climate change criticism" since 2010. Special issues of journals and conferences devoted to climate change frequently appeared. 1 There has been a considerable amount of scholarship on climate