Adeline Johns-Putra

Monash University (Malaysia) · School of Arts and Social Sciences

This chapter considers the possibility of a form of literary realism fit for the Anthropocene, which would not only allow readers to participate and intervene in the disclosure of climate catastrophe but would also position them within a climate-conscious collective. It begins with a brief discussion of realism, particularly its reliance, as analys...

This introduction sets out the volume’s main contention that any analysis of climate and literature must not only deal with the many ways in which climate has been conceptualised but also frame those conceptualisations as a pre-history to climate emergency. It chronicles first the vexed genealogy of climate and literature, showing how this history...

Investigating the relationship between literature and climate, this Companion offers a genealogy of climate representations in literature while showing how literature can help us make sense of climate change. It argues that any discussion of literature and climate cannot help but be shaped by our current - and inescapable - vantage point from an er...

The scalar disjuncts of the Anthropocene lead to a gap in anthropocentric perceptions and those of the species with whom we share the biosphere. This creates cognitive dissonance between attending to and accounting for the reality of multi-species agency on the one hand and retaining a sense of human-sized responsibility (and the agency that accomp...

This chapter outlines the emergence of climate fiction and its key modes. It pays particular attention to the extent to which climate fiction has worked within the established conventions of literary realism, meeting the many representational challenges mounted by climate change. While it considers the extent to which realism is able to render the...

This chapter is prompted by recent calls by historians and other scholars for new understandings of history in the Anthropocene, asking what this might mean for literary realism, invested as it is in the depiction of the passing of time. History in the Anthropocene renders redundant the human-historical, individual-universal dialectic that has long...

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...

Cambridge Core - Literary Theory - Climate Change and the Contemporary Novel - by Adeline Johns-Putra

Climate Change and the Contemporary Novel - by Adeline Johns-Putra March 2019

This essay considers the prevalence of the notion of posterity in popular climate change discourse; specifically, it scrutinises the ways in which this discourse deploys ideas of parenthood, and therefore appropriates the figure of the child. The essay argues that not just this preoccupation with posterity but the use of the child as a particularly...

How might literary scholarship engage with the sustainability debate? Aimed at research scholars and advanced students in literary and environmental studies, this collection brings together twelve essays by leading and up-coming scholars on the theme of literature and sustainability. In today's sociopolitical world, sustainability has become a ubiq...

Though it never names its ecological catastrophe, The Road is increasingly read as a climate change novel. I explore how this narrative of father and son walking a dead landscape speaks to contemporary environmental concerns. Adapting apocalyptic techniques, it contrasts a lost humanity (that is, being both human and humane) against present inhuman...

In the last 5 years, climate change has emerged as a dominant theme in literature and, correspondingly, in literary studies. Its popularity in fiction has given rise to the term cli‐fi, or climate change fiction, and speculation that this constitutes a distinctive literary genre. In theater, the appearance of several big‐name productions from 2009...

This essay contends that historicized textual analysis must account for the interlaced cultural and environmental conditions of a text’s composition and publication. Focusing on Eleanor Anne Porden’s The Arctic Expeditions (1818) as a depiction of global climate change, I demonstrate the extent to which discursive and ecological events are networke...

The emergence of the environmental humanities presents a unique opportunity for scholarship to tackle the human dimensions of the environmental crisis. It might finally allow such work to attain the critical mass it needs to break out of customary disciplinary confines and reach a wider public, at a time when natural scientists have begun to acknow...

The environment today is replete with invisible, elusive, fearful, yet wholly “real” entities revealed to us by science: acid rain, ozone depletion, pesticide tolerance, carrying capacity, overpopulation, species loss and, most recently, climate change. We all know about climate change. We know that it is happening, if only because scientific conse...

Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. To scan the now ubiquitous definition put forward by the Brundtland Commission is to realize that our construction of “sustainability” is driven by a notion of care—care for the nonhuman environm...

This article examines the medievalist epic CŒUR DE LION (1822), by Eleanor Anne Porden (1795–1825). The author reads this poem not simply for the way it draws on exhaustive research, but for the way it treats this research, invoking yet sidestepping the demands of historical accuracy. Specifically, Porden grapples with the challenges of representin...

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...

This paper calls for a rapprochement between ecocriticism and what it often disregards as theory. Specifically, it argues for the relevance of genre theory, which explores the dynamic relations of author, reader, text, and the worlds they inhabit. Texts are locatable within the environment of a given genre; further, generic environments reciprocall...

This article examines the work of four women poets in the 1780s and 1790s – in particular, the way they juxtapose the apparent triviality of the domestic with the more elevated concerns expected of the poetic or literary. In this analysis, this juxtaposition is aligned with the gap between low and high that characterises burlesque, a gap that is ex...

This paper emerges from a project conducted between academics in literary studies and geography that explored the creative process amongst writers who write for pleasure. It seeks to understand writing as creative process as well as simply representation, recovering process as a part of creative making. Building on a long tradition of theorising pr...

This book seeks to describe the history of the epic in Western culture, ending with evocations of the epic in literature and film in the English-speaking world. In order to do so, it must first ask the obvious question: What is the epic? Unfortunately, however, there is no equally obvious answer. Ours is an age in which ‘epic’ describes not just th...

By predicating the epic on the notion of influence and inter-textual dynamics, we can trace the genre along a retrospect of influence to the eighth century BC — that is, to the Iliad and the Odyssey of Homer. Even then, it must be borne in mind that these Greek epics, which we attribute to Homer, were not composed in a vacuum. They were the result...

From the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, the epic tradition resonates with the influence of the Aeneid. Yet Virgil’s long shadow falls across a territory marked by Christianity. Both epic poets and their commentators, writing in a Christianised age, felt the need to account for the pagan origins of epic heroism, which, whether as the wrath of...

The century or so after the appearance of Paradise Lost witnessed two significant developments in the epic tradition. The first is the tendency of poets such as John Dryden and Alexander Pope away from straightforward epic attempts towards related endeavours, namely, epic translation and mockepic. Dryden’s translation of the Aeneid appeared in 1697...

By the time we arrive at the nineteenth century, there exists an epic tradition constituted generally by the classical and Renaissance epics, but more particularly emblematised by Milton’s Paradise Lost. The epics of the nineteenth century, beginning with the Romantic age, acknowledge this epic influence in one way or another. But these epics are a...

With the popularity of the word as a simple adjective of scale at the end of the twentieth century, the term ‘epic’ has been applied loosely in cinema to describe films of either great duration or spectacular effects or both. The epic film, however, is more than just a blockbuster and, although we will investigate the links between the special effe...

The twentieth century saw the dawn of a realisation that the world comprises not one reality but a variety of shifting subjectivities, that the old assurances of linear history and theology can no longer hold true in the face of mass production (the technologisation of popular culture) and mass destruction (two world wars). The realisation that thi...