Climate and Literature

Explores the place of the concept of climate in literature from the classical age to the contemporary.

Adeline Johns-Putra (Edited by)

9781108422529, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 4 July 2019

346 pages, 2 b/w illus.
23.5 x 15.8 x 2.3 cm, 0.64 kg

'The collection provides an informed mapping of the concepts of weather and climate over time and allows for an engaging point of view to breathe new life into urgent cultural discussions.' Leonardo Nolé, Ecozon@

Leading scholars examine the history of climate and literature. Essays analyse this history in terms of the contrasts between literary and climatological time, and between literal and literary atmosphere, before addressing textual representations of climate in seasons poetry, classical Greek literature, medieval Icelandic and Greenlandic sagas, and Shakespearean theatre. Beyond this, the effect of Enlightenment understandings of climate on literature are explored in Romantic poetry, North American settler literature, the novels of empire, Victorian and modernist fiction, science fiction, and Nordic noir or crime fiction. Finally, the volume addresses recent literary framings of climate in the Anthropocene, charting the rise of the climate change novel, the spectre of extinction in the contemporary cultural imagination, and the relationship between climate criticism and nuclear criticism. Together, the essays in this volume outline the discursive dimensions of climate. Climate is as old as human civilisation, as old as all attempts to apprehend and describe patterns in the weather. Because climate is weather documented, it necessarily possesses an intimate relationship with language, and through language, to literature. This volume challenges the idea that climate belongs to the realm of science and is separate from literature and the realm of the imagination.

Introduction Adeline Johns-Putra
Part I. Origins: 1. Literature, climate, and time: between history and story Robert Markley
2. Atmosphere as setting, or, 'wuthering' the Anthropocene Jesse Oak Taylor
3. The seasons Tess Somervell
4. Climatic agency in the classical age Daryn Lehoux
5. Weathering the storm: adverse climates in medieval literature P. S. Langeslag
6. The climate of Shakespeare: four (or more) forecasts Lowell Duckert
Part II. Evolution: 7. Weather and climate in the age of enlightenment Jan Golinski
8. British romanticism and the global climate David Higgins
9. The literary politics of transatlantic climates Morgan Vanek
10. Climate and race in the age of empire Jessica Howell
11. Ethereal women: climate and gender from realism to the modernist novel Justine Pizzo
12. Planetary climates: terraforming in science fiction Chris Pak
13. The mountains and death: revelations of climate and land in Nordic noir Andrew Nestingen
Part III. Application: 14. The rise of the climate change novel Axel Goodbody and Adeline Johns-Putra
15. Climate and history in the Anthropocene: realist narrative and the framing of time Adeline Johns-Putra
16. The future in the Anthropocene: extinction and the imagination Claire Colebrook
17. Climate criticism and nuclear criticism Daniel Cordle.

Subject Areas: The environment [RN], Literary reference works [DSR], Literary theory [DSA]