Charged Readings and Momentous Expectations: The Curious Case of Climate Change Fiction

This article traces the inception, reception, and study of climate change fiction to show how profoundly awareness of anthropogenic climate crisis, and of the severity and scale of the collective human impact on the planet, have changed ways of reading, studying and interpreting literature. I use climate change fiction as a case study to highlight how discussions around literature’s status and supposed cultural and political agency in the Anthropocene have challenged literary practice in the twenty-first century. Climate change fiction represents a distinctive case because of the way it was critically anticipated and received. Early calls for climate change literature stressed its two main objectives: to translate scientific information into relatable narratives, and to effect meaningful change. This focus on literature’s pragmatic function, and ecocriticism’s tendency to ‘read for the message’, represent a shift in critical literary practice. The belief in climate change fiction’s political and cultural agency motivated an initial focus on realist and literary fiction, which shaped a selective canon that excluded the very kind of formal experimentation critics hoped to find. Discussing these criteria critically, I challenge the focus on the realist mode and survey studies that extend the canon and examine climate change fictions not as didactic tools but as ambiguous reflections of narratives and changes that define the twenty-first century.