Climate and Literature ed. by Adeline Johns-Putra (review)

One might expect a new book sporting this title to be mainly about literary responses to anthropogenic climate change, which has played such a large role in public discourse over the last few decades. While that certainly is one focus of this collection of essays by a number of (primarily American and English) scholars, the scope of the work is much broader, tracing connections between climate and literature all the way back to the beginnings of the latter—and the former as well: climate and literature have always been inextricably linked, in an important sense, as editor Adeline Johns-Putra proposes in her introduction: "climate emerges discursively… [it] necessarily possesses an intimate relationship with language, and through language, to literature" (pp. 1–2).

The work consists of seventeen chapters (besides the introduction), grouped into three sections. Part I, "Origins," opens with Robert Markley's "Literature, Climate, and Time," which considers in some detail several works from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but also exposes more general issues that reappear frequently in subsequent chapters: turning points in the historical representation of climate in literature; the potential utility of literary treatment of climate; the association of climate literature with science fiction; and the relationship between religious belief and climate thinking. (I will defer discussion of these common themes until all the essays have been introduced.) Chapter 2, by Jesse Oak Taylor, concentrates on atmosphere as both literal and figurative component of the novel, taking Wuthering Heights as the prime exemplar; it is followed by Tess Somerwell's account of how the cycle of seasons figures in (European) literature as a link between nature and culture.

The remainder of part I, and the book as a whole, follows a mostly chronological arc. In "Climatic Agency in the Classical Age," Daryn Leboux notes that someone (possibly Hippocrates, but that is not definitively known) claimed "one can attribute the characteristics of individual cities, of whole nations, and even whole regions, to their climates" (p. 72). P. S. Langeslag moves ahead to the medieval period, addressing two aspects: the prominent setting of borderline-habitable climates in Norse literature, and the part played by climate in "end-time" writings in the medieval church. The section closes with an essay on Shakespearean climate by Lowell Duckert, who—citing a pair of climate scientists who place the start of the Anthropocene in 1610—argues for its relevance to our own climate thinking.

Part II is labeled "Evolution;" its first chapter, by historian of science Jan Golinski, suggests that the Enlightenment brought about a major alteration of our conceptions of weather and climate. Particularly in Britain, increased attention to the measurement and recording of data led people "to conceive of weather as a constant—and not merely occasional—presence in human lives" (p. 111). The perception of extreme weather events as manifestations of divine intervention gave way to a more stable view of climate, and even to early belief that climate could be altered—improved, specifically—by human activity, thus ameliorating the inhospitable North American environment towards one more like Europe, better fit for civilized people. The next two chapters amplify those themes: David Higgins's "British Romanticism and the Global Climate" explores literary responses to the climatic effects of two immense volcanic eruptions around the turn of the nineteenth century, while Morgan Vanek looks into how transatlantic climate differences influenced political developments of the period. Jessica Howell shows how the theme of climate as cultural determinant informed thinking about race and empire in writers such as Burton, Conrad, and Kipling.

The last three chapters in this section take us into the 1900s. Justine Pizzo's "Ethereal Women: Climate and Gender from Realism to the Modernist Novel" harnesses the multivalent word "ethereal" to relate climate and feminine spirituality in works from the Victorian era through the first half of the twentieth century, followed by Chris Pak's examination of the theme of terraforming in several classic twentieth-century science fiction novels (Arthur C. Clarke's The Sands of...