ABSTRACT
Evoking Amitav Ghosh’s crucial claim, that “climate change casts a much smaller shadow within the landscape of literary fiction than it does even in the public arena,” an “aspect of the broader imaginative and cultural failure that lies at the heart of the climate crisis,” this chapter argues that this indictment can extend even to fictions that do take up climate change—even to some of those Ghosh singles out as exemptions to the generalized failure. First, the chapter places Ghosh’s sweeping indictment in relation to claims that in the literary scene climate concerns are in fact increasingly prominent, suggesting we understand such different accounts by considering both their relation to the question of genre and, mainly, their very different understandings of climate change’s urgency and of the claims it makes on fiction. Next, the chapter more closely examines the nature of Ghosh’s argument itself, along with Ursula Le Guin’s parallel framing of contemporary fiction’s failures. Finally, with readings of Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior (2012) and Liz Jensen’s The Rapture (2009), and Kim Stanley Robinson’s trilogy Green Earth (2015), the chapter more fully argues that, even with the emergence of “climate fiction” or “cli-fi,” Ghosh’s indictment remains mostly compelling.
