CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE 21ST-CENTURY BRITISH NOVEL

Astrid's book, Climate Crisis and the 21st-century British Novel was published by Bloomsbury Academic in November 2017. A preview of the book is available here. IShe has been blogging about the book on her website, where you can also find the cocktail-party explanation of my book (i.e. the book for non-specialists).

Climate Change and the 21st-century British Novel explores contemporary narratives of nature as means of understanding our ambiguous perceptions and experiences of the natural world at a time of environmental crisis. The narratives that emerge from post-millennial British fictions provide novel ways of imagining changing human engagements with the nonhuman natural world in the Anthropocene.

The book focuses on four types of narratives of nature – pastoral nature, urban nature, climate crisis nature, and polar nature – that are nexus points in which discourses on contemporary nature converge. Pastoral nature is both ideal and, especially in light of environmental crisis, problematic for its escapist connotations. Urban nature is often seen as an oxymoron which is nonetheless becoming ever more prominent and significant as urbanization increases. Climate crisis discourse has come to dominate cultural and environmental debates over the past decades. Stories about polar nature, finally, use historical explorations to comment on the poles as the last wilderness and a poignant symbol of contemporary environmental destruction.

Despite the prominence of these narratives in contemporary culture, their significance in post-millennial British novels by mainstream literary authors has received little to no attention. The book provides an interdisciplinary approach – drawing on ecocriticism and narratology, but also urban and rural studies – to explore how these narratives are radically changing and are subsequently changing the way we imagine nature, our relationship with it and ourselves.

The authors and texts discussed in Climate Change and the 21st-century British Novel are Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army (2007), Melissa Harrison’s Clay (2013), Rebecca Hunt’s Everland (2014), Francesca Kay’s The Translation of the Bones (2011), David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), Jeremy Page’s The Collector of Lost Things (2013), Ross Raisin’s God’s Own Country (2008), Amy Sackville’s The Still Point (2010), Zadie Smith’s N/W (2011), Graham Swift’s Wish You Were Here(2011), Sam Taylor’s Island at the End of the World (2010) and Gerard Woodward’s August (2001).

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THE COCKTAIL-PARTY EXPLANATION OF THE  BOOK

October 12, 2017

Writing a book about books seems alien to many people outside of academia. Over the past years I’ve tried to explain to family and friends why I was writing a book about 21st-century British novels, and why that’s even interesting. This is the explanation that I came up with.

My new book (published November 2nd, 2017) is about climate crisis and the way it is portrayed in 21st-century British novels. I start the book by discussing a different medium: the 2015 film The Revenant. This film about fur traders in 19th-century North America manages to be both historical and very topical. As Leonardo DiCaprio explained when he accepted the Oscar for his part in the film, The Revenant shows that ‘climate crisis is real’. Because the bleak, snowy landscapes that the film depicts no longer exist in Northern America, the film crew ended up in Antarctica. At the same time, as the film’s success shows, the wilderness that The Revenant shows remains an important part of how we think about nature.

Films and novels are a way in which we tell stories about ourselves and our environment. Roughly since the year 2000 it’s become much more normal to talk about climate crisis, to write books about it that aren’t non-fiction or science fiction, and to make films about it that are mainstream. Climate crisis has become part of our cultural consciousness – we’re not puzzled when a star like Leonardo DiCaprio talks about climate crisis at the Oscars. The omnipresence of climate crisis also means that it has become much easier and more natural for authors to refer to climate crisis. Things such as rising sea levels, increasing number of hurricanes or floods have become a kind of shorthand for climate crisis. We don’t need the scientific explanation to understand these and other events as part of climate crisis.

In the book I discuss twelve British novels published since 2000 that all show that climate crisis has become part of 21st-century life. The books, including NW by Zadie Smith and The Carhullan Army by Sarah Hall, aren’t explicitly ‘about’ climate crisis – rather, they show how the stories we tell about ourselves, the world and our place in it are increasingly influenced by awareness of climate crisis.

Novels – like films – create new stories. Urban nature is one of these newer stories. The city is no longer seen as the opposite of nature, but a place in which people can connect to nature, for example through parks and gardens, but also through farmers’ markets and local food. Another narrative that is relatively new is that of environmental collapse – stories in which societies collapse because of climate crisis. This story seems to become more popular every year, both in books such as Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, and in films such as seemingly every disaster movie made in the past five years.

Novels and films also update old stories of nature. We can’t really disappear into idealization of the countryside (pastoral) anymore without having in the backs of our minds climate change, livestock diseases and industrialization. While the Arctic and Antarctic were long the last frontiers of wilderness and heroic exploration, they’ve now become destinations for last chance to see or extinction tourism.

This is what my book tries to explain. Climate Crisis and the 21st-Century British Novel is available from Bloomsbury Academic, and I also write about the book on this blog. My exploration of the way British novels depict climate crisis is part of my work on ecocriticism. More of my ecocritical research can be found here.