ABSTRACT
Since the late 1980s, a new variety of English-language political fiction has developed – the green novel. Organized around tropes of crisis and decay, the new green novel gives generic form to the pervasive sense of urgency attached to environmental problems in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It is easily distinguished from neighboring forms, such as the fiction of urban crisis, by its treatment of Romantic and dystopian elements. These predecessor styles appear in transposed form in the new green novel, and the genre coheres around a stable set of motifs that update central ideas from the predecessors. In its most common version, the green novel expresses a critique of liberal individualist approaches to planetary problems, but in a few key works this critical tendency deepens into a more collective and affirmative mapping project.
