Climate and Literature

Description

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.

Adeline Johns-Putra is a Reader in English Literature at the University of Surrey. She is author of The History of the Epic (2006) and Heroes and Housewives: Women's Epic Poetry and Domestic Ideology in the Romantic Age (2001). Her edited books include Process: Landscape and Text (2010) and Literature and Sustainability: Concept, Text, and Culture (2017). She was Chair of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, UK and Ireland, from 2011 to 2015.

'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 Nole, Ecozon@