ABSTRACT
Contemporary novels – particularly speculative fiction — would feature prominently, but a longer historical view would consider earlier moments of climate anxiety. More profoundly, the disjunctive time scales of climate change transcend historical periods and resist literary representation. Over millions of years, dead creatures fossilized into fuels that humans have consumed within a few centuries, with implications for life on Earth for millennia to come. These dilations of the narrative logic of cause and effect are temporal and spatial: climate change promises a future anterior of changes yet-to-come that will have been affected by carbon emitted long ago and far away from its most extreme effects. Nixon describes human vulnerability to environmental harm as “unevenly universal”– another pithy formulation that should indicate the necessity of comparison and transnational thinking as literary studies confront climate change.
