Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change, Adam Trexler

Mary Woodbury

April 1, 2015

Though this book is non-fiction, it might be one of the first to seriously study climate change novels. Publication date: April 20, 2015.

Since the Industrial Revolution, humans have transformed the Earth’s atmosphere, committing our planet to more extreme weather, rising sea levels, melting polar ice caps, and mass extinction. This period of observable human impact on the Earth’s ecosystems has been called the Anthropocene Age. The anthropogenic climate change that has impacted the Earth has also affected our literature, but criticism of the contemporary novel has not adequately recognized the literary response to this level of environmental crisis. Ecocriticism’s theories of place and planet, meanwhile, are troubled by a climate that is neither natural nor under human control. Anthropocene Fictions is the first systematic examination of the hundreds of novels that have been written about anthropogenic climate change.

Goodreads Reviews

Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change (Under the Sign of Nature: Explorations in Environmental Humanities)