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 futures, the Anthropocene, postcolonialism, climate anxiety, and the usefulness of storytelling in engaging with catastrophe. The essays offer approaches to teaching interdisciplinary and cross-listed courses, including strategies for team-teaching across disciplines and for building connections between humanities majors and STEM majors. The volume concludes with essays that explore ways to address grief and to contemplate a hopeful future in the face of apocalyptic predictions.

Debra J. Rosenthal is the author of two monographs, most recently Performatively Speaking: Speech and Action in Antebellum American Literature. She is also the editor of five volumes of scholarly essays, most recently Cli-Fi and Class: Socioeconomic Justice in Contemporary American Climate Fiction.