Project MUSE®: Twentieth-Century Literature - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/652
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Twentieth-Century Literature.daily12026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 61 (2015) through current issueLatest Articles: Twentieth-Century LiteratureTWOProject MUSE®Twentieth-Century Literature2325-81010041-462XLatest articles in Twentieth-Century Literature. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Introduction: Writing (About) Literature While the House Burns Down
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982610
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“Clearly, something is wrong with the way we talk about the climate crisis.” In our call for papers for this issue, that was a perhaps too coarse a way of setting out our premise. It’s not just that, however useful for stylistic expediency, referring there to how “we” talk obscures the crucial fact that the power to produce and circulate the dominant representations of climate change is concentrated in those most fully invested in the business as usual that produces the crisis in the first place. It’s also that the sentence is in fact not entirely accurate. If it were really “clear” that something is “wrong,” there’d be no reason to say so.But there is. Consider that the current climate system is likely rapidly
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/652/image/coversmallIntroduction: Writing (About) Literature While the House Burns Down2026-02-10text/htmlen-USIntroduction: Writing (About) Literature While the House Burns Down2026-02-102026TWOProject MUSE®339162026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-02-10Climate Change and the Vicissitudes of Transspecies Imaginaries
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982611
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When we look at beetles and elephants, sea urchins and earthworms, parents and friends, we see individuals, working their way through life as a bunch of cells in a single body, driven by a single brain, and operating with a single genome. This is a pleasant fiction. In fact, we are legion, each and every one of us.Climate Change and Nuclearism as the two major anthropogenic dangers for the survival of planetary life need to take center stage in current debates about the Anthropocene and Capitalocene. Jason Moore (2016) and others have proposed the term Capitalocene instead of Anthropocene to emphasize capitalism’s pivotal role in environmental degeneration, and Dipesh Chakrabarty (2021) called for a rethinking of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/652/image/coversmallClimate Change and the Vicissitudes of Transspecies Imaginaries2026-02-10text/htmlen-USClimate Change and the Vicissitudes of Transspecies Imaginaries2026-02-102026TWOProject MUSE®655052026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-02-10The Future and the Fetish: Children, Climate Distress, and Disability in Richard Powers’s Bewilderment
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982612
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In Bewilderment (2021), Richard Powers charts a year in the life of a nine-year-old boy named Robin Byrne, a neurodivergent child whose emotional outbursts appear increasingly commensurate with the crises unfolding in the world around him. The narrative is focalized through the perspective of Robin’s father, Theo, an astrobiologist and single parent who both resists the pathologizing of his son and seeks to alleviate Robin’s distress without resorting to psychoactive drugs. Eventually, Robin finds temporary relief by participating in a clinical trial. By training his mind through a treatment called decoded neurofeedback, Robin cultivates resilience in the face of ecological and societal collapse and even becomes a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/652/image/coversmallThe Future and the Fetish: Children, Climate Distress, and Disability in Richard Powers’s Bewilderment2026-02-10text/htmlen-USThe Future and the Fetish: Children, Climate Distress, and Disability in Richard Powers’s Bewilderment2026-02-102026TWOProject MUSE®1089972026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-02-10Stories for a Burning World: Marek Oziewicz on Climate Literacy and Youth Literature
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982613
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On July 26, Claudia Sadowski-Smith and Lee Zimmerman interviewed Marek Oziewicz about the current state of climate literature for young adults and children. The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and length.To begin with a question based on the introduction to your coedited special issue of The Lion and the Unicorn, “Children’s Literature and Climate Change” (2021), we were wondering how your thinking has evolved since your introduction was written. Have you noticed any shifts in how climate change is portrayed in children’s or young adult literature since that time?We now have more stories—in picture books, graphic novels, YA novels, and in chapter books—where issues around climate change are
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/652/image/coversmallStories for a Burning World: Marek Oziewicz on Climate Literacy and Youth Literature2026-02-10text/htmlen-USStories for a Burning World: Marek Oziewicz on Climate Literacy and Youth Literature2026-02-102026TWOProject MUSE®764162026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-02-10Beyond Cli-Fi: Visionary Fictions, Futures Thinking, and a Cosmovisionary Archive
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982614
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In September 2024, the United Nations hosted hundreds of global delegates at the Summit of the Future (SotF), a monumental effort to forge a new international pact on how to safeguard the future for today’s youth and for “generations not yet born” (United 2024). Organizers of the SotF acknowledged that, globally, nations that signed the Paris Agreement seemed to be going backward, not forward, on their commitments to the United Nations’ Agenda 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to end poverty, hunger, and inequality and accelerate progress on the challenges of climate change and environmental degradation.1 As director of the Flagship Hub of UNESCO BRIDGES,2 the first humanities-led sustainability coalition
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/652/image/coversmallBeyond Cli-Fi: Visionary Fictions, Futures Thinking, and a Cosmovisionary Archive2026-02-10text/htmlen-USBeyond Cli-Fi: Visionary Fictions, Futures Thinking, and a Cosmovisionary Archive2026-02-102026TWOProject MUSE®1325992026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-02-10Impotent Poethics: James Schuyler and Reparative Climate Lyricism
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982615
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Meantime, those branches go Ungathered up. I hate fussing with nature and would like the world to be All weeds. I see it from the train, city bound, how the yuccas and chicory Thrive. So much messing about, why not leave the world alone? Then There would be no books, which is not to be borne. Willa Cather alone is worth The price of admission to the horrors of civilization.To be worthy of the name, avant-garde art and discourse must respond to the conditions of a burning world and seek to change them. Politically radical discourse thus places demands on avant-garde art: it must somehow locate itself outside of structures of social domination and aim to serve revolutionary ends, yet also resist constructing
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/652/image/coversmallImpotent Poethics: James Schuyler and Reparative Climate Lyricism2026-02-10text/htmlen-USImpotent Poethics: James Schuyler and Reparative Climate Lyricism2026-02-102026TWOProject MUSE®978862026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-02-10Wild Fictions: Essays on Literature, Empire, and the Environment by Amitav Ghosh (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982616
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Readers of Amitav Ghosh might recall a poignant exchange in The Hungry Tide in which Kanai describes his late uncle Nirmal as a historical materialist. For the old man, the phrasemeant that everything which existed was interconnected: the trees, the sky, the weather, people, poetry, science, nature. He hunted down facts in the way a magpie collects shiny things. Yet when he strung them all together, somehow they did become stories—of a kind.This description perfectly fits the authorial persona of Ghosh’s latest collection of essays, Wild Fictions. The volume comprises a range of sundry pieces written over the past twenty-five years on various occasions, some of which have been previously published in academic
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/652/image/coversmallWild Fictions: Essays on Literature, Empire, and the Environment by Amitav Ghosh (review)2026-02-10text/htmlen-USWild Fictions: Essays on Literature, Empire, and the Environment by Amitav Ghosh (review)2026-02-102026TWOProject MUSE®249142026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-02-10Everyday Ecofascism: Crisis and Consumption in American Literature by Alexander Menrisky (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982617
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Like fascism itself, ecofascism is a term that although widely written about in political theory and history,1 remains fraught and contested, and has thus evaded definitions that could account for the full scope of its production and proliferation across the political and cultural landscape. When historians and political theorists describe ecofascism they often point to extreme examples of those who espouse environmental ideologies predicated on maintaining existing systems of power and inequity and who advocate for mass violence, or at least perceive violence as an inevitability. For example, the gunman in New Zealand who, in 2019, massacred fifty-one people at a mosque in Christchurch, and the gunman in Buffalo
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-13T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/652/image/coversmallEveryday Ecofascism: Crisis and Consumption in American Literature by Alexander Menrisky (review)2026-02-10text/htmlen-USEveryday Ecofascism: Crisis and Consumption in American Literature by Alexander Menrisky (review)2026-02-102026TWOProject MUSE®212652026-05-13T00:00:00-05:002026-02-10