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

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.

Drawing on climatology, the sociology and philosophy of
science, geography, and environmental economics, Adam Trexler argues that the novel has become
an essential tool to construct meaning in an age of climate change. The novel expands the reach
of climate science beyond the laboratory or model, turning abstract predictions into
subjectively tangible experiences of place, identity, and culture. Political and economic
organizations are also being transformed by their struggle for sustainability. In turn, the
novel has been forced to adapt to new boundaries between truth and fabrication, nature and
economies, and individual choice and larger systems of natural phenomena. Anthropocene
Fictions argues that new modes of inhabiting climate are of the utmost critical and
political importance, when unprecedented scientific consensus has failed to lead to action.

Under the Sign of Nature: Explorations in Ecocriticism