The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Anthropocene

The Anthropocene is a proposed geological epoch marking humanity's alteration of the Earth: its rock structure, environments, atmosphere. The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Anthropocene offers the most comprehensive survey yet of how literature can address the social, cultural, and philosophical questions posed by the Anthropocene. This volume addresses the old and new literary forms - from novels, plays, poetry, and essays to exciting and evolving genres such as 'cli-fi', experimental poetry, interspecies design, gaming, weird, ecotopian and petro-fiction, and 'new' nature writing. Studies range from the United States to India, from Palestine to Scotland, while addressing numerous global signifiers or consequences of the Anthropocene: catastrophe, extinction, 'fossil capital', warming, politics, ethics, interspecies relations, deep time, and Earth. This unique Companion offers a compelling account of how to read literature through the Anthropocene and of how literature might yet help us imagine a better world.

• Offers a comprehensive and global survey of literature and the Anthropocene at a critical juncture in the development and establishment of the Anthropocene proposal.
• Features a step-by-step survey of literary genres and Anthropocene themes supported by an overview of literature and the Anthropocene in the introduction.
• Offers a close focus on the particular qualities that each literary form or genre might bring to unravelling the complexities of the Anthropocene or to addressing the social, cultural, and philosophical questions that it raises.