The Rise and Rise of the Climate Change Novel

 

A lecture by Dr Johns-Putra in the UK on

    May 19, 2016

Where?

Room 21/22 BA 02 Centre for Environmental Strategy University of Surrey Guildford

               

Speaker:

Dr Adeline Johns-Putra

 

In the last ten years, climate change has emerged as a dominant theme in literature.  Its popularity in fiction has given rise to the term cli-fi, or ''climate change fiction,'' and a new literary theory devised by climate activist Dan Bloom that this constitutes a distinctive literary genre.

There have been similar, though not as remarkable, trends in theatre and poetry. I discussed some of the background to the emergence of cli-fi aka ''climate change fiction,'' summarise some of its dominant themes, narrative arcs, and motifs, and speculate on its relationship to public responses to climate change.

 

Adeline Johns-Putra is Reader in English Literature at the University of Surrey.  She was president of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, UK and Ireland, from 2011 to 2015.  Her papers on climate change and literature have been published in English Studies, WIREs Climate Change, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment and Modern Fiction Studies.  She is currently writing a book on climate change fiction.