REAL - Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature, Volume 33 (2017)

Meteorologies of Modernity explores the ways in which literature reflects and participates in discourses on weather and climate – historically as well as at our contemporary moment. Literature contains a huge meteorological archive built throughout the centuries. The essays collected in this volume therefore ask to what extent literature can bring the vastness and complexity of climate change into view, how literature offers ways to think through the challenges of the Anthropocene both culturally, historically, and aesthetically, and, last but not least, how it helps us to conceptualize a radically new understanding of what it means to be human. The thirteen contributions from literary and cultural studies address weather and climate discourses from a variety of conceptual angles and cover a broad range of historical and geographical contexts. Topics include representations of tropical climates in Shakespeare, the close yet tense relationship between literature and the rising discipline of meteorology in the nineteenth century, allegories of climate change in postcolonial literature, and climate catastrophes in the contemporary clifi novel. By employing a historicizing and comparative approach, the volume addresses the need for studying representations of climate and climate change in an interdisciplinary, transnational and transhistorical framework, overcoming traditional disciplinary boundaries and creating new collectives of theory and criticism that are essential when debating the Anthropocene.

Inhalt:
Acknowledgements
Contributors
SARAH FEKADU, HANNA STRAß-SENOL
Introduction
I. THEORIZING WEATHER AND CLIMATE CHANGE
DIPESH CHAKRABARTY
Climate and Capital: On Conjoined Histories
ROBERT STOCKHAMMER
Philology in the Anthropocene
EVA HORN
Global Warming and the Rhetoric of Heat
II. HISTORICIZING PERSPECTIVES
JOHANNES UNGELENK
The Climate of th‘ Isle: Shakespeare's Tempest
OLIVER GRILL
Weather – or Not? Meteorology and the Art of Prediction in
Humboldt's Kosmos and Stifter's Der Nachsommer
SOLVEJG NITZKE
Creating "Klima" in a Changing World:
Weather and Environment in Peter Rosegger's Forest Fictions
PATRICK RAMPONI
Nietzsche's Meteoropathy:
Weather, Sickness and the Globalization of 'Milieu'
III. METHODS AND PERSPECTIVES
ALEXA WEIK VON MOSSNER
Sensing the Heat: Weather, Water, and Vulnerabilities in Paolo
Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife
REINHARD HENNIG
Climate Change Denial in Literary Fiction:
Gert Nygårdshaug’s ‘Eco-Thriller’ Chimera
URS BÜTTNER
Nature Makes History: Narrating Nature in Gerhard Richter and Alexander Kluge’s December
IV. POSTCOLONIAL RESPONSES
ELIZABETH DELOUGHREY
The Sea is Rising:
Visualizing Climate Change in the Pacific Islands
SARAH FEKADU
The North and the Desert:
Tayeb Salih’s Poetics of the Anthropocene
HANNA STRAß-SENOL
Weather Phenomena in Linda Hogan’s People of the Whale