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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.Thieme’s close readings are many, and all contribute a specific insight into the text examined. His reading makes us think about the stakes of Anthropocene realism. Consistently, he provides convincing evidence of a new generation of writers innovating the novel genre and expanding the scope of literary realism.
Journal of Modern Literature
Examining the challenges faced by novelists writing realist fiction in the age of climate change, this open access book considers the various ways in which contemporary writers have evolved new and transformed modes of realism to grapple with the problems of living on an endangered planet.
Focusing on fiction set in the ‘long present’ – a term used to cover the actual present, the near future and an historic past that interacts with the present – Thieme argues that long-present realism negates the possibility of deferring engagement with the climate crisis on the grounds that it is a future threat.
Thieme examines work by twelve novelists: Margaret Atwood, James Bradley, Amitav Ghosh, Helon Habila, Liz Jensen, Barbara Kingsolver, Ian McEwan, Richard Powers, Annie Proulx, Indra Sinha, Antii Tuomainen and Wu Ming-Yi. He provides important new insights into the methods these writers use to convey the urgency of the climate crisis and how their work can inform our understandings of the Anthropocene activity that endangers life on Earth.
The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Knowledge Unlatched.
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