Over the past three decades, humanity has become increasingly conscious that we are changing the climate, and contemporary writers are finding expression for this concern in emergent genres such as cli-fi and ecopoetry. Yet, just as these genres draw on deeper literary traditions, our relationship with – and impact on – the climate has a much lengthier history. 

This course traces that lengthier literary history into the twenty-first century, the century in which we are said to have entered the Anthropocene – an epoch in which humanity itself constitutes a planetary-changing force on the geological scale. We will look not only at the ways the form, function and reception of Anglophone literature have responded to the changing climate, but also how the warming world is transforming the way we read and understand literature. 

Our reading will cover such sensitive issues as ecocide and extinction, and we will examine the work of a wide array of international writers in English, from Lord Byron, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner and Margaret Atwood to Amitav Ghosh, Naomi Klein, Paolo Bacigalupi and Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner.