Julia Hoydis - Böcker

This Element presents a necessary intervention within the rapidly expanding field of research in the environmental humanities on climate change and environmental literacy. In contrast to the dominant, science-centred literacy debates, which largely ignore the unique resources of the humanities, it asks: How does literary reading contribute to climate change communication? How does this contribution relate to recent demands for environmental and related literacies? Rather than reducing the function of literature to a more pleasurable form of information transfer or its affective dimension of evoking sympathy, climate change literacy thoroughly reassesses the cognitive, affective, and pedagogic potentials of literary writing. It does so by analysing a selection of popular climate novels and by demonstrating the role of fiction in fostering a more adequate understanding of, and response to, climate change. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Aging Studies and Ecocriticism: Interdisciplinary Encounters argues that both aging studies and ecocriticism address the complex dynamics of individual and collective agency, oppression and dependency, care and conviviality, vulnerability and resistance as well as intergenerationality and responsibility. Yet, even though both fields employ overlapping methodologies and theoretical frameworks and scrutinize “boundary texts” in different literary genres, which have been analyzed from ecocritical perspectives as well as from the vantage point of critical aging studies, there has been little scholarly interaction between ecocritical literary studies and aging studies to date. The contributors in this volume demonstrate the potential of specific genres to narrate relationality and age, and the aesthetic and ethical challenges of imagining changes, endings, and survival in the Anthropocene. As the first step towards putting both fields in conversation, this collection offers new pathways into understanding human and nonhuman ecological relations.

This collection of essays explores current thematic and aesthetic directions in fictional science narratives in different genres, predominantly novels, but also poetry, film, and drama.

This collection of essays explores current thematic and aesthetic directions in fictional science narratives in different genres, predominantly novels, but also poetry, film, and drama.

Taking the cue from the currency of risk in popular and interdisciplinary academic discourse, this book explores the development of the English novel in relation to the emergence and institutionalization of risk, from its origins in probability theory in the late seventeenth century to the global ‘risk society’ in the twenty-first century. Focussing on 29 novels from Defoe to McEwan, this book argues for the contemporaneity of the rise of risk and the novel and suggests that there is much to gain from reading the risk society from a diachronic, literary-cultural perspective. Tracing changes and continuities, the fictional case studies reveal the human preoccupation with safety and control of the future. They show the struggle with uncertainties and the construction of individual or collective ‘logics’ of risk, which oscillate between rational calculation and emotion, helplessness and denial, and an enabling or destructive sense of adventure and danger. Advancing the study of risk in fiction beyond the confinement to dystopian disaster narratives, this book shows how topical notions, such as chance and probability, uncertainty and responsibility, fears of decline and transgression, all cluster around risk.

Taking the cue from the currency of risk in popular and interdisciplinary academic discourse, this book explores the development of the English novel in relation to the emergence and institutionalization of risk, from its origins in probability theory in the late seventeenth century to the global ‘risk society’ in the twenty-first century. Focussing on 29 novels from Defoe to McEwan, this book argues for the contemporaneity of the rise of risk and the novel and suggests that there is much to gain from reading the risk society from a diachronic, literary-cultural perspective. Tracing changes and continuities, the fictional case studies reveal the human preoccupation with safety and control of the future. They show the struggle with uncertainties and the construction of individual or collective ‘logics’ of risk, which oscillate between rational calculation and emotion, helplessness and denial, and an enabling or destructive sense of adventure and danger. Advancing the study of risk in fiction beyond the confinement to dystopian disaster narratives, this book shows how topical notions, such as chance and probability, uncertainty and responsibility, fears of decline and transgression, all cluster around risk.