Climate Change Fictions ― Representations of Global Warming in American Literature

This book highlights the importance of the cultural sphere, and in particular literature, in response and discussion with the unprecedented phenomenon known as climate change. Antonia Mehnert turns to a set of contemporary American works of fiction, reading them as a unique response to the challenges of representing climate change. She draws on “climate change fiction”— texts dealing explicitly with anthropogenic climate change—and explores how these works convey climate change, deal with its challenging characteristics, and with what narrative techniques they ultimately participate in its communication. Indeed, a number of challenging traits make climate change a difficult issue to engage with including its slow and long temporal dimension, global scale, scientific controversy, and its disconnect between cause and effect. Considering such complexity and uncertainty at the source of climate change fictions, this book moves beyond a solely ecocritical analysis and shows how these climate change fictions constitute an insightful cultural repertoire valuable for discussion in the environmental humanities in general.

Antonia Mehnert currently works in environmental communication and consulting for a Munich-based environmental project agency. She received her PhD from the Rachel Carson Center and the American Studies Department at the University of Munich, Germany. Her research interests include ecocriticism and climate change, Chicana/o studies, and the postcolonial Caribbean. She has published various articles on climate change fiction in academic, as well as non-academic journals, and is the co-founder of EASLCE’s postgraduate forum “Environment, Literature, Culture” (ELC).?