American Environmentalism and Encounters with the Abject: T. Coraghessan Boyle’s A Friend of the Earth

Mayer, Sylvia

doi:10.1163/9789401204897_012

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Set in 2025–2026 when the biosphere has collapsed, it also looks back to the 1980s and 1990s, where its protagonists are environmental activists in an Earth First!‐like organization, struggling to save forests and wild animals. Mayer reads the novel as a rather bitter, postmodern satire of environmental activism as having failed to prevent the worst effects of climate change 72. Gleason, meanwhile, describes the novel as an ‘important environmentalist novel on the dangers of global warming’ (112) 73.…”

Section: Literary Studies and Climate Changementioning

confidence: 99%

Climate change in literature and literary criticism

Trexler

Johns‐Putra

2011

WIREs Climate Change

107

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Abstract: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 critical task. We explore how the complexity of climate change as both scientific and cultural phenomenon demands a corresponding degree of complexity in fictional representation. For example, when authors represent climate change as a global, networked, and controversial phenomenon, they move beyond simply employing the environment as a setting and begin to explore its impact on plot and character, producing unconventional narrative trajectories and innovations in characterization. Then, such creative complexity asks of literary scholars a reassessment of methods and approaches. For one thing, it may require a shift in emphasis from literary fiction to genre fiction. It also particularly demands that environmental criticism, or ecocriticism, moves beyond its long-standing interest in concepts of 'nature' and 'place', to embrace a new understanding of the local in relation to the global. We suggest, too, that there are synergies to be forged between these revisionary moves in ecocriticism and developments in literary critical theory and historicism, as these critical modes begin to deal with climate change and reimagine themselves in turn.Climate change now occupies a primary position not just on political and scientific agendas but in the wider cultural imagination. Just five years ago, Robert Macfarlane bemoaned the dearth of creative response to climate change, asking, 'Where are the novels, the plays, the

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Section: Literary Studies and Climate Changementioning

confidence: 99%