The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Anthropocene

Description

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.

John Parham is Professor of Environmental Humanities at the University of Worcester (UK). He has authored or co-edited five books including Green Media and Popular Culture (2016) and (with Louise Westling) A Global History of Literature and the Environment (2017). He has edited the journal Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism for 19 years.

'Recommended.' J. Bilbro, Choice Magazine