Anthropocene Realism: Fiction in the Age of Climate Change

This book explores how contemporary novelists are adapting realism to address the challenges of climate change, focusing on the "long present" and the urgency of the crisis. It examines twelve novelists' work and offers insights into their methods for conveying the urgency of the crisis and its impact on life on Earth. The ebook editions are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 224 pages
Publication date: 20 March 2025
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Novelists writing realist fiction in the age of climate change face numerous challenges. This open access book explores how contemporary writers have developed new and transformed modes of realism to address the problems of living on an endangered planet. The book focuses on fiction set in the "long present," which encompasses the actual present, the near future, and an historic past that interacts with the present. The author, Thieme, argues that long-present realism negates the possibility of deferring engagement with the climate crisis, as it is a future threat. Thieme examines the work of twelve novelists: Margaret Atwood, James Bradley, Amitav Ghosh, Helon Habila, Liz Jensen, Barbara Kingsolver, Ian McEwan, Richard Powers, Annie Proulx, Indra Sinha, Antii Tuomainen, and Wu Ming-Yi. He provides important new insights into the methods these writers use to convey the urgency of the climate crisis and how their work can inform our understandings of the Anthropocene activity that endangers life on Earth. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Knowledge Unlatched.

Dimension: 234 x 156 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781350296077