REAL - Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature

Meteorologies of Modernity explores the ways in which literature reflects and participates in discourses on weather and climate – historically as well as at our contemporary moment. Literature contains a huge meteorological archive built throughout the centuries. The essays collected in this volume therefore ask to what extent literature can bring the vastness and complexity of climate change into view, how literature offers ways to think through the challenges of the Anthropocene both culturally, historically, and aesthetically, and, last but not least, how it helps us to conceptualize a radically new understanding of what it means to be human. The thirteen contributions from literary and cultural studies address weather and climate discourses from a variety of conceptual angles and cover a broad range of historical and geographical contexts. Topics include representations of tropical climates in Shakespeare, the close yet tense relationship between literature and the rising discipline of meteorology in the nineteenth century, allegories of climate change in postcolonial literature, and climate catastrophes in the contemporary clifi novel. By employing a historicizing and comparative approach, the volume addresses the need for studying representations of climate and climate change in an interdisciplinary, transnational and transhistorical framework, overcoming traditional disciplinary boundaries and creating new collectives of theory and criticism that are essential when debating the Anthropocene.



Acknowledgements

Contributors

SARAH FEKADU, HANNA STRAß-SENOL

Introduction

I. THEORIZING WEATHER AND CLIMATE CHANGE

DIPESH CHAKRABARTY

Climate and Capital: On Conjoined Histories

ROBERT STOCKHAMMER

Philology in the Anthropocene

EVA HORN

Global Warming and the Rhetoric of Heat

II. HISTORICIZING PERSPECTIVES

JOHANNES UNGELENK

The Climate of th' Isle: Shakespeare's Tempest

OLIVER GRILL

Weather – or Not? Meteorology and the Art of Prediction in

Humboldt's Kosmos and Stifter's Der Nachsommer

SOLVEJG NITZKE

Creating "Klima" in a Changing World:

Weather and Environment in Peter Rosegger's Forest Fictions

PATRICK RAMPONI

Nietzsche's Meteoropathy:

Weather, Sickness and the Globalization of 'Milieu'

III. METHODS AND PERSPECTIVES

ALEXA WEIK VON MOSSNER

Sensing the Heat: Weather, Water, and Vulnerabilities in Paolo

Bacigalupi's The Water Knife

REINHARD HENNIG

Climate Change Denial in Literary Fiction:

Gert Nygårdshaug's 'Eco-Thriller' Chimera

URS BÜTTNER

Nature Makes History: Narrating Nature in Gerhard Richter and Alexander Kluge's December

IV. POSTCOLONIAL RESPONSES

ELIZABETH DELOUGHREY

The Sea is Rising:

Visualizing Climate Change in the Pacific Islands

SARAH FEKADU

The North and the Desert:

Tayeb Salih's Poetics of the Anthropocene

HANNA STRAß-SENOL

Weather Phenomena in Linda Hogan's People of the Whale