Introduction / Adeline Johns-Putra -- Literature, climate, and time : between history and story / Robert Markley -- Atmosphere as setting, or, "Wuthering" the Anthropocene / Jesse Oak Taylor -- The seasons / Tess Somervell -- Climatic agency in the classical age / Daryn Lehoux -- Weathering the storm : adverse climates in medieval literature / P.S. Langeslag -- The climate of Shakespeare : four (or more) forecasts / Lowell Duckert -- Weather and climate in the age of Enlightenment / Jan Golinski -- British romanticism and the global climate / David Higgins -- The literary politics of transatlantic climates / Morgan Vanek -- Climate and race in the age of empire / Jessica Howell -- Ethereal women : climate and gender from realism to the modernist novel / Justine Pizzo -- Planetary climates : terraforming in science fiction / Chris Pak -- The mountains and death : revelations of climate and land in Nordic noir / Andrew Nestingen -- The rise of the climate change novel / Axel Goodbody and Adeline Johns-Putra -- Climate and history in the Anthropocene : realist narrative and the framing of time / Adeline Johns-Putra -- The future in the Anthropocene : extinction and the imagination / Claire Colebrook -- Climate criticism and nuclear criticism / Daniel Cordle.
Summary:
Leading scholars examine the history of climate and literature. Essays analyse this history in terms of the contrasts between literary and climatological time, and between literal and literary atmosphere, before addressing textual representations of climate in seasons poetry, classical Greek literature, medieval Icelandic and Greenlandic sagas, and Shakespearean theatre. Beyond this, the effect of Enlightenment understandings of climate on literature are explored in Romantic poetry, North American settler literature, the novels of empire, Victorian and modernist fiction, science fiction, and Nordic noir or crime fiction. Finally, the volume addresses recent literary framings of climate in the Anthropocene, charting the rise of the climate change novel, the spectre of extinction in the contemporary cultural imagination, and the relationship between climate criticism and nuclear criticism. Together, the essays in this volume outline the discursive dimensions of climate. Climate is as old as human civilisation, as old as all attempts to apprehend and describe patterns in the weather. Because climate is weather documented, it necessarily possesses an intimate relationship with language, and through language, to literature. This volume challenges the idea that climate belongs to the realm of science and is separate from literature and the realm of the imagination.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.