Astrid Bracke’s research while affiliated with HAN University of Applied Sciences and other places

The Anthropocene is a proposed geological epoch marking humanity's alteration of the Earth: its rock structure, environments, atmosphere. The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Anthropocene offers the most comprehensive survey yet of how literature can address the social, cultural, and philosophical questions posed by the Anthropocene. This volume addresses the old and new literary forms - from novels, plays, poetry, and essays to exciting and evolving genres such as 'cli-fi', experimental poetry, interspecies design, gaming, weird, ecotopian and petro-fiction, and 'new' nature writing. Studies range from the United States to India, from Palestine to Scotland, while addressing numerous global signifiers or consequences of the Anthropocene: catastrophe, extinction, 'fossil capital', warming, politics, ethics, interspecies relations, deep time, and Earth. This unique Companion offers a compelling account of how to read literature through the Anthropocene and of how literature might yet help us imagine a better world.

Cambridge Core - English Literature after 1945 - The Cambridge Companion to Ian McEwan - edited by Dominic Head

This article presents a subset of twenty-first-century British novels and defines them as flood fictions. Through their depiction of climate crisis floods, novels such as Megan Hunter’s The End We Start From, Clare Morrall’s When the Floods Came, and Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army constitute a major imaginative response to climate change. Flood fictions as I define them are characterized by two features: first, the depiction of floods as an effect of and synecdoche for climate crisis, making use in particular of the historical and visual connotations of floods; and, second, the depiction of the literal submersion of the narratives themselves by means of language erosion and narrative fragmentation. As such, flood fictions tackle some of the imaginative and representative challenges posed by the Anthropocene. My reading of these novels provides an intervention in current debates on imagining and narrating climate crisis and presents a previously unexplored and underexplored subset of literary works.

Bracke traces the depiction of nature in Crace’s novels through the lens of ecocriticism (The Gift of Stones, 1988; Signals of Distress, 1994; and Being Dead, 1999), exploring two developments in ecocriticism: a concern with the global and the development of econarratology. Early ecocriticism emphasized (non-fictional) realism and was indebted to the pastoral and skeptical of the contemporary (British) novel. Gradually, via engagement with science fiction and depictions of terra forming and awareness beyond the local, more recent ecocriticism has explored a wider variety, including contemporary British novels. These developments are paralleled in Crace’s novels, from the emphasis on pastoral, to engagements with the global (Signals of Distress and The Gift of Stones) and a concern with new materialism and non-human narration in Being Dead.