A Cultural History of Climate Change

This book recovers complex histories that continue to shape both how we understand climate and what we understand by it. It also examines how climate change compels us to rethink many of our existing traditional means of historical understanding. This book examines It addresses these questions climate change from transdisciplinary perspectives across the environmental humanities, including oral history, museum studies, history of religion, literary history, philosophy and critical legal studies..

Autorentext

Tom Bristow is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, University of Melbourne, Australia.

Thomas H. Ford is a Lecturer in English at Monash University, Australia.

Zusammenfassung
Charting innovative directions in the environmental humanities, this book examines the cultural history of climate change under three broad headings: history, writing and politics. Climate change compels us to rethink many of our traditional means of historical understanding, and demands new ways of relating human knowledge, action and representations to the dimensions of geological and evolutionary time. To address these challenges, this book positions our present moment of climatic knowledge within much longer histories of climatic experience. Only in light of these histories, it argues, can we properly understand what climate means today across an array of discursive domains, from politics, literature and law to neighbourly conversation. Its chapters identify turning-points and experiments in the construction of climates and of atmospheres of sensation. They examine how contemporary ecological thought has repoliticised the representation of nature and detail vital aspects of the history and prehistory of our climatic modernity.This ground-breaking text will be of great interest to researchers and postgraduate students in environmental history, environmental governance, history of ideas and science, literature and eco-criticism, political theory, cultural theory, as well as all general readers interested in climate change.

Inhalt

Introduction: Climates of History, Cultures of Climate Tom Bristow and Thomas H. Ford

Part 1 Climates of History

1. Voices of Endurance: Climate and the Power of Oral History Deb Anderson

2. Rethinking Seasons: Changing Climate, Changing Time Christian O'Brien

3. The Terrestrial Envelope: Joseph Fourier's Geological Speculation Jerome Whitington

4. Melancholy and the Continent of Fire Tom Bristow and Andrea Witcomb

5. The Anthropocene and the Long Seventeenth Century: 1550-1750 Linda Williams

Part 2 Climates of Writing

6. Change Beyond Belief: Fictions of (the) Enlightenment and Simpson's 'Climate Change Suite' Jayne Lewis

7. Fuels and Humans, Bíos and Zoe Karen Pinkus

8. The 'Foreign Grave' Motif in Victorian Medicine and Literature: Climate Therapy and The Limits of Human Environmental Control Roslyn Jolly

9. Climate Change and Literary History Thomas H. Ford

Part 3 Climates of Politics

10. Climate Change: Politics, Excess, Sovereignty Nick Mansfield

11. Para-Religions of Climate Change: Humanity, Eco-Nihilism, Apocalypse S. Romi Mukherjee

12. Litigation, Activism, and the Paradox of Lawfulness in an Age of Climate Change Nicole Rogers

13. This Is Not My Beautiful Biosphere Timothy Morton