Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Labinger, Jay

Titel

Climate and Literature ed. by Adeline Johns-Putra (review)

Ist Teil von

• Configurations, 2021-04, Vol.29 (2), p.235-237

Ort / Verlag

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2021

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Literature Online (LION)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• David Higgins's "British Romanticism and the Global Climate" explores literary responses to the climatic effects of two immense volcanic eruptions around the turn of the nineteenth century, while Morgan Vanek looks into how transatlantic climate differences influenced political developments of the period. Colebrook draws "a stark contrast between biblical apocalypse … where the end of this fragile and fleeting world is a haunting possibility that allows for the thought of a world beyond the mundane, and the current vogue for imagining the 'end of the world' as nothing more than the end of liberal and affluent capitalist urbanity" (p. 279), and goes on to lament the impoverished vision of contemporary cli-fi: "Far from climate change prompting writers to question whether the mode of human existence that altered the planet as a living system should be extinguished to make way for other forms of life, the threat to human existence … has enabled a contraction of the human imagination not merely to the human species, but to humanity in its urban, affluent, hyper-consuming, and globally subsuming form" (p. 277). [...]many of the authors address (implicitly or explicitly) the question of whether there have been significant discontinuities in climate thinking over the years. [...]Langeslag notes that "flooding and runaway atmospheric warming are prominent literary concerns in the apocalyptic literature of medieval Europe" (p. 90), while both Golinski and Vanek highlight the belief in anthropogenic climate change during settlement of the New World.