Climate Change and the Contemporary Novel

Analysing how contemporary fiction explores climate change, Johns-Putra argues that literature can help us understand our obligations to the future.

List of contents

Introduction; 1. The ethics of posterity and the climate change novel; 2. The limits of parental care ethics: Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Maggie Gee's The Ice People; 3. Overpopulation and motherhood environmentalism: Edan Lepucki's California and Liz Jensen's The Road; 4. Identity, ethical agency, and radical posterity: Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods and Sarah Hall's The Carhullan Army; 5. Science, utopianism, and ecocentric posterity: Kim Stanley Robinson's 'Science in the Capital' and Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behaviour; Conclusion: the sense of no ending.

About the author

Adeline Johns-Putra is Reader in English Literature at the School of Literature and Languages, University of Surrey. She is the author of Heroes and Housewives: Women's Epic Poetry and Domestic Ideology in the Romantic Age (2001) and The History of the Epic (2006). She is also the editor of Process: Landscape and Text (2010) and Literature and Sustainability: Concept, Text and Culture (2017).

Summary

The growing number of contemporary climate change novels tend to frame global warming in terms of our relationship to our children and the generations to come. Johns-Putra investigates how such fiction might help us to better understand our ethical responsibilities to the future in a time of great ecological peril.

Product details

• Authors: Adeline Johns-Putra, Adeline (University of Surrey) Johns-Putra, Johns-Putra Adeline
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press ELT
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 31.12.2018
• EAN: 9781108427371
• ISBN: 978-1-108-42737-1
• No. of pages: 196
• Series: Cambridge Studies in Twenty-First Century Literature and Culture; Cambridge Studies in Twenty-Fi; Cambridge Studies in Twenty-First Century Literature and Culture; Cambridge Studies in Twenty-Fi; Cambridge Studies in Twenty-First-Century Literature and Culture
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; Natural sciences, medicine, IT, technology > Biology > Ecology; LITERARY CRITICISM / Semiotics & Theory, Literary theory