Presented by Adeline Johns-Putra Humanities Research Centre, also Reader in English Literature at the University of Surrey (from September 2012). She is currently completing a monograph onclimate change and the contemporary novel.

The ‘climate change novel’ is now something of a genre in its own right:since the end of the last century, a spate of novels, including books by such literary worthies as Margaret Atwood, T. C. Boyle, Doris Lessing, Cormac McCarthy, Will Self, and Jeanette Winterson, have dealt with climatic catastrophe. In these climate change dystopias, humankind’s hubris becomes part of the psychological texture of the narrative: the message is that we simply have not cared enough, and we need to care more. In some of these novels, too,the conventional dystopian dynamic is simplistically gendered, and a feminised capacity for care is pitted against a brutal, brave new world of masculinist-capitalist scientism.



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