Table Of ContentClimate Crisis and the 21st-Century
British Novel
Environmental Cultures Series
Series Editors:
Greg Garrard, University of British Columbia, Canada
Richard Kerridge, Bath Spa University
Editorial Board:
Frances Bellarsi, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium
Mandy Bloomfield, Plymouth University, UK
Lily Chen, Shanghai Normal University, China
Christa Grewe-Volpp, University of Mannheim, Germany
Stephanie LeMenager, University of Oregon, USA
Timothy Morton, Rice University, USA
Pablo Mukherjee, University of Warwick, UK
Bloomsbury’s Environmental Cultures series makes available to students and
scholars at all levels the latest cutting-edge research on the diverse ways in
which culture has responded to the age of environmental crisis. Publishing
ambitious and innovative literary ecocriticism that crosses disciplines, national
boundaries and media, books in the series explore and test the challenges of
ecocriticism to conventional forms of cultural study.
Titles available:
Bodies of Water, Astrida Neimanis
Cities and Wetlands, Rod Giblett
Climate Crisis and the 21st-Century British Novel, Astrid Bracke
Ecocriticism and Italy, Serenella Iovino
Literature as Cultural Ecology, Hubert Zapf
Nerd Ecology, Anthony Lioi
The New Nature Writing, Jos Smith
The New Poetics of Climate Change, Matthew Griffiths
This Contentious Storm, Jennifer Mae Hamilton
Forthcoming titles:
Colonialism, Culture, Whales, Graham Huggan
Eco-Digital Art, Lisa FitzGerald
Romantic Ecologies in Postcolonial Perspective, Kate Rigby
Climate Crisis and the 21st-Century
British Novel
Astrid Bracke
Bloomsbury Academic
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First published 2018
© Astrid Bracke, 2018
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Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction: Climate Crisis and the Cultural Imagination 1
1 Collapse 23
2 Pastoral 49
3 Urban 79
4 Polar 105
Conclusion 133
Notes 146
References 157
Index 172
Acknowledgements
Many people supported the writing of this book. I am grateful to those who
provided feedback and let me test out ideas in various stages of the project.
During my visit to the University of Idaho (Moscow) in late 2013, I first began
thinking about this book and discussed it with Jennifer Ladino and Scott
Slovic. Erin James gave valuable feedback throughout the entire project: I
am thankful for our conversations on econarratology and our transatlantic
collaboration. Terry Gifford, Adeline Johns-Putra, Deborah Lilley and Heather
Sullivan provided feedback on the individual chapters that helped clarify
my thoughts and strengthen my argumentation. Reinhard Hennig’s careful
reading of a paper I gave at NIES X in 2014 sharpened my ideas about polar
landscapes. I also want to thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments
and encouragement.
Much of my writing and thinking on ecocriticism is shaped by the work of
Greg Garrard and Richard Kerridge. I want to thank them for their support
throughout the years and particularly for taking on this book as editors
of Bloomsbury Academic’s Environmental Cultures series. The team at
Bloomsbury Academic, especially David Avital, Mark Richardson and Lucy
Brown, provided friendly and practical support throughout the project.
My work on contemporary British fiction goes back to the dissertation
I wrote at Radboud University (Nijmegen) in 2008–2012. I want to thank
Odin Dekkers for his support of that project and the feedback he gave on
the proposal that led to this book. My former colleagues at the University of
Amsterdam gave me the opportunity to teach on my research and provided a
stimulating environment in which to think through this book. I want to thank
my colleagues at HAN University of Applied Sciences for their interest in the
book as I was writing it.
A special thank you goes to my friends and family, without whose support
writing this book would have been a lonely endeavour. I had dozens of cups of
tea and coffee and conversations about writing with Griet Coupé and Kristine
Acknowledgements vii
Johanson. Without my parents’ lifelong support, love and faith in me I might
never have found the courage to embark on a research career. Finally, my
deepest gratitude goes to Jaap Meijers, my first reader. Thank you for your
enthusiasm for this book, for your love and for always cheering me on.
Introduction:
Climate Crisis and the Cultural Imagination
The 2015 film The Revenant tells a classic tale of survival. After being left
for dead, the main character – played by Leonardo DiCaprio – braves ice,
snow and vicious animals to return to civilization. Though set in the 1820s,
The Revenant also became a story about twenty-first-century climate crisis.
Accepting the award for Best Actor for his role in the film, DiCaprio revealed
that the crew had to move filming to Antarctica in order to get sufficient
snow (DiCaprio 2016: n.p.). Climate change, he concluded, ‘is real’ (DiCaprio
2016: n.p.). While DiCaprio is well-known for his environmental activism, his
speech illustrates the cultural currency of climate crisis today. Climate crisis
has so much become part of the contemporary cultural consciousness that
it forms an inherent background to twenty-first-century life. As this book
demonstrates, a wide variety of literary fictions reflect this awareness of climate
crisis and participate in the construction and renegotiation of the stories that
surround it.
While climate crisis and the role it plays in contemporary culture are in
many ways a typically twenty-first-century story, worries about the changing
climate are by no means new. The eruption of Tambora volcano in Indonesia in
1815 caused worldwide harvest failures and bad weather. The ‘year without a
summer’ is believed to have inspired both Byron’s poem ‘Darkness’ (1816) and
Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1818).1 In the 1840s, scholars warned that
the sun might burn out and global cooling would make life on earth impossible
in its current form.2 Around the same time, the British Rainfall Organisation
was set up in response to public concern that rainfall was decreasing in
Britain. Such worries about the climate possibly changing emerged in a time
in which great advances were made in the sciences. The scenarios sketched
