Climate Change Fictions: Representations of Global Warming in American Literature

ISBN-13: 9783319403366 / Angielski / Twarda / 2016 / 254 str.

Antonia Mehnert

Opis

This book highlights the importance of the cultural sphere, and in particular literature, in response and discussion with the unprecedented phenomenon known as climate change.

Spis treści

Table of Contents

 

Acknowledgements

 

Introduction: Imagining Climate Change Futures

 

Chapter 1: Climate Change Fictions in Context: Socio-Politics, Environmental Discourse and Literature

           

Chapter 2: Scaling Climate Change—The Transformation of Place in Climate Change Fiction

 

Chapter 3: Reimagining Time in Climate Change Fiction 

 

Chapter 4: Manufactured Uncertainty: Climate Risks in an Age of “Heightened Security”

           

Chapter 5: Climate Cultures in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital Trilogy

 

Chapter 6: Representing the Underrepresented: Climate Justice and Future Responsibilities in Climate Change Fiction           < 

Conclusion: Climate Change Fiction and the Introduction of New Genres in Environmental Crisis Discourse

 

Notes

Bibliography

Index

 

 

O autorze

Antonia Mehnert currently works in environmental communication and consulting for a Munich-based environmental project agency. She received her PhD from the Rachel Carson Center and the American Studies Department at the University of Munich, Germany. Her research interests include ecocriticism and climate change, Chicana/o studies, and the postcolonial Caribbean. She has published various articles on climate change fiction in academic, as well as non-academic journals, and is the co-founder of EASLCE’s postgraduate forum “Environment, Literature, Culture” (ELC). 

Blurb

This book highlights the importance of the cultural sphere, and in particular literature, in response and discussion with the unprecedented phenomenon known as climate change. Antonia Mehnert turns to a set of contemporary American works of fiction, reading them as a unique response to the challenges of representing climate change. She draws on “climate change fiction”— texts dealing explicitly with anthropogenic climate change—and explores how these works convey climate change, deal with its challenging characteristics, and with what narrative techniques they ultimately participate in its communication. Indeed, a number of challenging traits make climate change a difficult issue to engage with including its slow and long temporal dimension, global scale, scientific controversy, and its disconnect between cause and effect. Considering such complexity and uncertainty at the source of climate change fictions, this book moves beyond a solely ecocritical analysis and shows how these climate change fictions constitute an insightful cultural repertoire valuable for discussion in the environmental humanities in general.