Climate Crisis and the 21st-Century British Novel Environmental Cultures Series Series Editors: Greg Garrard, University of British Columbia, Canada Richard Kerridge, Bath Spa University Editorial Board: Frances Bellarsi, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium Mandy Bloomfield, Plymouth University, UK Lily Chen, Shanghai Normal University, China Christa Grewe-Volpp, University of Mannheim, Germany Stephanie LeMenager, University of Oregon, USA Timothy Morton, Rice University, USA Pablo Mukherjee, University of Warwick, UK Bloomsbury’s Environmental Cultures series makes available to students and scholars at all levels the latest cutting-edge research on the diverse ways in which culture has responded to the age of environmental crisis. Publishing ambitious and innovative literary ecocriticism that crosses disciplines, national boundaries and media, books in the series explore and test the challenges of ecocriticism to conventional forms of cultural study. Titles available: Bodies of Water, Astrida Neimanis Cities and Wetlands, Rod Giblett Climate Crisis and the 21st-Century British Novel, Astrid Bracke Ecocriticism and Italy, Serenella Iovino Literature as Cultural Ecology, Hubert Zapf Nerd Ecology, Anthony Lioi The New Nature Writing, Jos Smith The New Poetics of Climate Change, Matthew Griffiths This Contentious Storm, Jennifer Mae Hamilton Forthcoming titles: Colonialism, Culture, Whales, Graham Huggan Eco-Digital Art, Lisa FitzGerald Romantic Ecologies in Postcolonial Perspective, Kate Rigby Climate Crisis and the 21st-Century British Novel Astrid Bracke Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc LONDON • OXFORD • NEW YORK • NEW DELHI • SYDNEY Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway London New York WC1B 3DP NY 10018 UK USA www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2018 © Astrid Bracke, 2018 Astrid Bracke has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-7112-7 ePDF: 978-1-4742-7114-1 eBook: 978-1-4742-7113-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Series: Environmental Cultures Cover design by Paul Burgess / Burge Agency. Cover image © Shutterstock Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com. Here you will find extracts, author interviews, details of forthcoming events and the option to sign up for our newsletters. Contents Acknowledgements vi Introduction: Climate Crisis and the Cultural Imagination 1 1 Collapse 23 2 Pastoral 49 3 Urban 79 4 Polar 105 Conclusion 133 Notes 146 References 157 Index 172 Acknowledgements Many people supported the writing of this book. I am grateful to those who provided feedback and let me test out ideas in various stages of the project. During my visit to the University of Idaho (Moscow) in late 2013, I first began thinking about this book and discussed it with Jennifer Ladino and Scott Slovic. Erin James gave valuable feedback throughout the entire project: I am thankful for our conversations on econarratology and our transatlantic collaboration. Terry Gifford, Adeline Johns-Putra, Deborah Lilley and Heather Sullivan provided feedback on the individual chapters that helped clarify my thoughts and strengthen my argumentation. Reinhard Hennig’s careful reading of a paper I gave at NIES X in 2014 sharpened my ideas about polar landscapes. I also want to thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments and encouragement. Much of my writing and thinking on ecocriticism is shaped by the work of Greg Garrard and Richard Kerridge. I want to thank them for their support throughout the years and particularly for taking on this book as editors of Bloomsbury Academic’s Environmental Cultures series. The team at Bloomsbury Academic, especially David Avital, Mark Richardson and Lucy Brown, provided friendly and practical support throughout the project. My work on contemporary British fiction goes back to the dissertation I wrote at Radboud University (Nijmegen) in 2008–2012. I want to thank Odin Dekkers for his support of that project and the feedback he gave on the proposal that led to this book. My former colleagues at the University of Amsterdam gave me the opportunity to teach on my research and provided a stimulating environment in which to think through this book. I want to thank my colleagues at HAN University of Applied Sciences for their interest in the book as I was writing it. A special thank you goes to my friends and family, without whose support writing this book would have been a lonely endeavour. I had dozens of cups of tea and coffee and conversations about writing with Griet Coupé and Kristine Acknowledgements vii Johanson. Without my parents’ lifelong support, love and faith in me I might never have found the courage to embark on a research career. Finally, my deepest gratitude goes to Jaap Meijers, my first reader. Thank you for your enthusiasm for this book, for your love and for always cheering me on. Introduction: Climate Crisis and the Cultural Imagination The 2015 film The Revenant tells a classic tale of survival. After being left for dead, the main character – played by Leonardo DiCaprio – braves ice, snow and vicious animals to return to civilization. Though set in the 1820s, The Revenant also became a story about twenty-first-century climate crisis. Accepting the award for Best Actor for his role in the film, DiCaprio revealed that the crew had to move filming to Antarctica in order to get sufficient snow (DiCaprio 2016: n.p.). Climate change, he concluded, ‘is real’ (DiCaprio 2016: n.p.). While DiCaprio is well-known for his environmental activism, his speech illustrates the cultural currency of climate crisis today. Climate crisis has so much become part of the contemporary cultural consciousness that it forms an inherent background to twenty-first-century life. As this book demonstrates, a wide variety of literary fictions reflect this awareness of climate crisis and participate in the construction and renegotiation of the stories that surround it. While climate crisis and the role it plays in contemporary culture are in many ways a typically twenty-first-century story, worries about the changing climate are by no means new. The eruption of Tambora volcano in Indonesia in 1815 caused worldwide harvest failures and bad weather. The ‘year without a summer’ is believed to have inspired both Byron’s poem ‘Darkness’ (1816) and Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1818).1 In the 1840s, scholars warned that the sun might burn out and global cooling would make life on earth impossible in its current form.2 Around the same time, the British Rainfall Organisation was set up in response to public concern that rainfall was decreasing in Britain. Such worries about the climate possibly changing emerged in a time in which great advances were made in the sciences. The scenarios sketched