Firing the Climate Canon : A critique of the literary genre of climate change

Burnett, Lucy (2018) Firing the Climate Canon : A critique of the literary genre of climate change. Green Letters, 22 (2). pp. 161-180. ISSN 1468-8417

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Abstract

This article makes the case for more climate change, where climate change refers to the prevailing ideologies and frameworks that inform our understanding of environmental change in the first place. It reviews the mainstream literature in popular science writing, fiction and poetry from the point of view of a political frame analysis of climate change, to demonstrate how a certain understanding of climate change maps onto conventions of literary genre. This understanding, and associated literature, is critiqued on the basis of their continued attachment to dualistic and teleological narratives of human mastery and progress, such as to make the case for a literature which offers something radically other. The current political context, not least Donald Trump’s victory and Brexit, is cited as evidence of the contemporary importance of alternatives to the establishment approach to climate mitigation than either denial or scepticism—in both literature, and more broadly.