Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. It illustrates how extreme weather texts comply with conservative gender, class, and race regimes. It is the contention that media coverage of extreme weather events and their aftermaths is customarily shaped so as to arouse but also strictly control spectatorial modes of compassion and pleasure. The book proceeds mindful of the complexities of both compassion and detachment as they are summoned and provoked by media representations of weather disaster. It discusses that extreme weather media tend to most prominently feature a heavy emphasis on notions of personal/private resilience, even while hyping communal recovery. In seeking to better understand the nature and functions of weather media hype, this contribution to the emergent literature of the environmental humanities takes up deeply influential and yet sparsely analyzed media forms in a geological epoch increasingly referred to as the Anthropocene.