Climate and Literature ed. by Adeline Johns-Putra [Book Review]

Abstract

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).