Table of Contents

1.Introduction
2.‘Weather as Everything’: Social Realism in Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior
3.Seeking ‘The Perfect Story’: Metajournalistic Realism in Helon Habila’s Oil on Water
4.Apocalypse Now? Visceral Realism in Liz Jensen’s The Rapture
5.Tracing Genealogies: Circumstantial Realism in Annie Proulx’s Barkskins
6.‘Trees Are Social Creatures’: Animist Realism in Richard Powers’ The Overstory
7.It’s Not Funny: Comic Realism in Ian McEwan’s Solar
8.Beyond the Anthropocene: Testimonial Realism in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People
9.Nordic Noir: Urban Realism in Antti Tuomainen’s The Healer
10.‘Everything Change’: Speculative Realism in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy
11.‘Outside the Range of the Probable’? Picaresque Realism in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island
12.Conclusion
Bibliography

Promotional Information

The book considers the poetics of twenty-first century climate change fiction, focusing on realism and exploring the realist mode as a means to engage readers with what is without doubt one of, if not the, most pressing problem of our day: climate change

About the Author

John Thieme is currently Senior Fellow at the University of East Anglia, UK. He previously held Chairs at the University of Hull and London South Bank University and his previous books include Postcolonial Con-Texts: Writing Back to the Canon, Postcolonial Literary Geographies, Postcolonial Literary Geographies, and studies of Derek Walcott, V.S. Naipaul and R.K. Narayan.