CLI-Fi and Class - (Under the Sign of Nature) by Debra J Rosenthal & Jason de Lara Molesky (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

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 ecosystems and the socioeconomically disadvantaged.

Cli-Fi and Class focuses on the representation of class dynamics in climate-change narratives. With fifteen essays on the intersection of the economic and the ecological--addressing works ranging from the novels of Joseph Conrad, Cormac McCarthy, and Octavia Butler to the film Black Panther and the Broadway musical Hadestown --this collection unpacks the complex ways economic exploitation impacts planetary well-being, and the ways climatic change shapes those inequities in turn.

Review Quotes

This collection fills an important gap and helps to reorient the debate about the climate crisis by underlining the fast and slow violence of structural poverty as well as catastrophic weather. Offering thought-provoking analyses of contemporary writers such as Lauren Groff, Octavia Butler, and Barbara Kingsolver, the contributors demonstrate that the cultural debate on the Anthropocene and on climate justice needs to include an ecopoverty lens and they further explain how climate narratives can help us to articulate new environmentalisms of the poor and of the eroding middle class. A timely, original, and valuable contribution.

About the Author

Debra J. Rosenthal is Professor of English at John Carroll University and the author of Performatively Speaking: Speech and Action in Antebellum American Literature. Jason de Lara Molesky is a postdoctoral fellow at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University and Assistant Professor of English at Saint Louis University.