This book originated out of my desire to reclaim climate change fiction (cli-fi) from the view that it is primarily concerned with future disasters and written in modes that go beyond realism to encompass the horrors of the looming apocalypse. Brilliant though novels of this kind can be, they seemed to me to run the… Read More »
Guest post by Marco Caracciolo The future has always been uncertain, but the ecological crisis presents us with an unprecedented degree of uncertainty in thinking about the future. Scientists who model the effects of global warming typically distinguish between pessimistic and optimistic scenarios. The gap between them is significant: concretely, it could mean the difference… Read More »
What is the Global Challenges in Environmental Humanities series about? By global challenges we mean threats to the biosphere occurring at planetary, pan-continental or trans-oceanic scales. These include biodiversity loss, unsustainable economic and social changes in landscape, or the diverse impacts of climate change on cultural memory and socio-environmental futures – these are among the many risks and vulnerabilities implicated in the latest IPCC reports. Such challenges also include gradually unfolding disasters that are less spectacular, such as disease, nutritional deficiencies or other forms of ill health that stretch over individual human life spans or even across generations, owing to many causes – toxic accumulation of waste in environments, structurally reinforced poverty, environmental racism, failed social policy, cultural inertia, corporate malfeasance and neglect.
Summer is upon us, and that means the semester is over and so is required reading. Now’s your chance to pick up a book you’re excited to read instead of one you’re teaching for the seventh time. Whether you’re researching or relaxing this summer, we have plenty of books to keep you occupied (and perhaps… Read More »
It’s time for a March and April roundup! Highlighted below are the newest publications from Bloomsbury Literary Studies. In Otherwise, Revolution!: Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, Rebecca Tillett provides a groundbreaking reading of Almanac for the 21st century, comparing Silko’s activist armies with recent international popular social justice activism such as the Arab Spring, the international Occupy… Read More »
February has been a productive month for new Bloomsbury Academic publications! Highlighted below are the newest addtions to the Bloomsbury family. Psychoanalytic Horizons In Mourning Freud, Madelon Sprengnether surveys and examines the changes in psychoanalytic theories and practices over the course of the 20th century in relation to how we interpret Freud today. This is an… Read More »
Guest post by Astrid Bracke At some point early into my research on climate crisis, I began to get the feeling that climate crisis was everywhere. I saw it referenced in films, novels, in food advertising. This, of course, happens to anyone who immerses herself in a topic: suddenly, her new interest seems all over.… Read More »
Matthew Griffiths answered some questions for us about The New Poetics of Climate Change: Modernist Aesthetics for a Warming World, now out in the Environmental Cultures series. How would you describe your book in one sentence? Poets need more sophisticated ways of writing to engage with climate change, and Modernism provides valuable resources for them… Read More »
Jos Smith answered some questions for us about The New Nature Writing: Rethinking the Literature of Place, the latest volume in the Environmental Cultures series. How would you describe your book in one sentence? An appraisal of shifting cultural attitudes to nature and place in the UK over the last forty years through a detailed… Read More »
We hope you’ve enjoyed hearing about our Environmental Cultures series this week and have had a chance to browse the texts of the first two books on our open access platform. Look out for these books coming later this year: The next book arrives in August, when we publish Cities and Wetlands: The Return of… Read More »