Climate Crisis and the 21st-Century British Novel

by Bracke, Astrid; Garrard, Greg; Kerridge, Richard

• ISBN13: 9781474271127
• ISBN10: 147427112X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2017-07-27
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Summary

In recent decades, the challenge of rapid climate change has forced us to rethink traditional attitudes to nature. This book is the first study to chart these changing attitudes in 21st-century British fiction. Climate Crisis and the 21st-Century British Novel examines the ways in which today's literature engages with four different environmental narratives: the pastoral, the urban, the polar and climate change. Bringing ecocriticism into dialogue with a new body of contemporary writing, Astrid Bracke explores a wide range of texts, from Zadie Smith's N/W through Ian McEwan's Solar and David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas to the work of a new generation of novelists such as Melissa Harrison and Ross Raisin. Through the work of these writers, this book shows how post-millennial fictions provide the imaginative space to rethink relationships between the human and the natural world.

Author Biography

Astrid Bracke is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. She regularly publishes on environmental issues on her blog at https://astridbracke.wordpress.com/.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Narratives of Nature in British Post-Millennial Literature
1. Between Retreat and Return: Redefining Pastoral
2. “Seeing Nature in the City Is Only a Matter of Perception”: Reconceptualizing Nature in Urban Narratives
3. The End of the World As We Know It: The (Im)possibility of Imagining Climate Change
4. A Frozen and Wondrous World: Extinction and Environmentalism at the Poles
Conclusion: Post-Millennial British Fiction and More Than Green Nature
Notes
Bibliography
Index