In recent decades, the Anthropocene has become a powerful concept for understanding climate change, extinction, and planetary crisis, and literature is one of its most vital arenas of reflection and imagination. Drawing together the work of both emerging and leading scholars from across the globe, this volume explores how stories, genres, and critical debates illuminate humanity's profound impact on Earth. From Romantic precursors to contemporary climate fiction, from deep time to speculative futures, this volume traces how literature and literary studies grapple with questions of scale, ethics, and entanglement across global contexts. Combining historical depth with current theory, the book offers fresh insights into topics such as infrastructure, animal studies, colonialism, and extractivism, while engaging urgent questions: How have literature and literary studies anticipated and responded to humanity's fraught relation with the planet? Can literature change our behavior and help us imagine new, more sustainable ways of living?
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The book explores literature's role in imagining, critiquing, and narrating the Anthropocene across scales, genres, and global contexts.
Introduction: The Anthropocene and Literature Tore Rye Andersen; Part I.
Origins:
1. The Anthropocene: A Literary Career Pieter Vermeulen;
2.
Ecocriticism and the Anthropocene Scott Slovic;
3. Climate Fiction: Origins
and Recent Developments Caren Irr;
4. Scale Timothy Clark;
5. Deep Time Noah
Heringman; Part II. Developments:
6. The Anthropocene of the Global South or
Deep-Time History Anthropocene Senayon Olaoluwa;
7. Empire and Extractivism:
On Matter and Form in Patrick Chamoiseau's Slave Old Man and Helena María
Viramontes's Under the Feet of Jesus Stacey Balkan;
8. White Flight of the
Anthropos: Gentrification of the Anthropocene Imaginary Henry Ivry;
9.
Multispecies Stories Keita Hatooka;
10. Literature, Extinction, and the
Anthropocene Claire Colebrook;
11. Post-Goethean World Literature, or
Curating the Planetary Archive in the Anthropocene Christian Moraru; Part
III. Applications:
12. The Sea Søren Frank;
13. Desert Rune Graulund;
14.
Planet-Thinking-Feeling: Sensuous Earth-Reeling in Samantha Harvey's Orbital
Nicole M. Merola;
15. Infrastructure Reuben Martens;
16. Speculative Fiction
Rebecca Ballard;
17. The Understory: Climate Realisms and the Long Fight in
Creation Lake Ben De Bruyn;
18. Anthropocene Media Theories Jørgen Bruhn;
19.
Utopia and the Anthropocene Andrew Milner.
Tore Rye Andersen is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Aarhus University. He has published numerous essays on literary fiction in journals such as Critique, Narrative, Poetics Today, Textual Practice, and American Literary History. His most recent book is Planetary Pynchon: History, Modernity, and the Anthropocene (Cambridge University Press, 2023).
