April 30, 2024

Edited by Debra J. Rosenthal. MLA Book Publications, 2024.

Over the past several decades, writers such as Margaret Atwood, Paolo Bacigalupi, Octavia E. Butler, and Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner have explored climate change through literature, reflecting current anxieties about humans’ impact on the planet. Emphasizing the importance of interdisciplinarity, this volume embraces literature as a means to cultivate students’ understanding of the ongoing climate crisis, ethics in times of disaster, and the intrinsic intersectionality of environmental issues.

Contributors to Teaching the Literature of Climate Change discuss speculative climate ...

Edited by Debra J. Rosenthal and Jason de Lara Molesky. University of Virginia Press, 2023.

Since its emergence in the late twentieth century, climate fiction—or cli-fi—has concerned itself as much with economic injustice and popular revolt as with rising seas and soaring temperatures. Indeed, with its insistent focus on redressing social disparities, cli-fi might reasonably be classified as a form of protest literature. As environmental crises escalate and inequality intensifies, literary writers and scholars alike have increasingly scrutinized the dual exploitations of the earth’s ...

By William Steffen. Oxford University Press, 2023.

Anthropocene Theater and the Shakespearean Stage revises the anthropocentric narrative of early globalization from the perspective of the non-human world in order to demonstrate Nature’s agency in determining ecological, economic, and colonial outcomes. It welcomes readers to reimagine theater history in broader terms, and to account for more non-human and atmospheric players in the otherwise anthropocentric history of Shakespearean performance. This book analyses plays, horticultural manuals, cosmetic recipes, Puritan polemics, and travel writing in order to demonstrate ...

By Hsuan Hsu. Bloomsbury, 2024.

As a technology of environmental comfort, air conditioning aspires to pass unnoticed. Yet, by manipulating the air around us, it quietly conditions the baseline conditions of our physical, mental, and emotional experience. In homes, offices, libraries, museums, archives, and shopping malls, climate control systems shore up the fantasy of a comfortable, self-contained body. At the same time that air conditioning makes temperature a non-issue in (some) people’s daily lives, thermoception—or the sensory perception of temperature—is being carefully studied and ...