The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Climate

Description

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 era of climate change, and uncovers a longer literary history of climate that might inform our contemporary climate crisis. Essays explore the conceptualisation of climate in a range of literary and creative modes; they represent a diversity of cultural and historical perspectives, and a wide spectrum of voices and views across the categories of race, gender, and class. Key issues in climate criticism and literary studies are introduced and explained, while new and emerging concepts are discussed and debated in a final section that puts expert analyses in conversation with each other.

Adeline Johns-Putra is Professor of Literature at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. She is a past president of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, UK and Ireland (ASLE-UKI). Her books include Climate Change and the Contemporary Novel (2019) and The History of the Epic (2006), and the edited volumes Climate and Literature (2019) and Cli-Fi: A Companion (2018). Kelly Sultzbach is a Professor at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse, and was a Fulbright Scholar with University of Liverpool in 2019. She is a co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Climate (with Adeline Johns-Putra), and the author of Ecocriticism in the Modernist Imagination: Forster, Woolf, and Auden (2016). Recent work also includes articles in Modernist Cultures, the ASLE UKI journal Green Letters (2019) and a chapter in Understanding Merleau-Ponty, Understanding Modernism (2018).