The Anthropocene Novel

Abstract

Abstract This chapter investigates US fiction that engages with the implications of the idea of the Anthropocene, the conception of the current geological age as the first during which human civilization has been the predominant force shaping the earth’s environment. The chapter glosses the genre of “cli fi,” which focuses on climate change as its primary subject and develops the concept of “Anthropocene social fiction,” in which the drama of consciousness becomes entangled in the historical contexts and ecological losses of the period that begins with the Great Acceleration of the 1950s. Examining the ways in which the Anthropocene novel dramatizes the phenomenon of living with a global-scale phenomenon that exceeds individual imagination, the chapter argues that Anthropocene social fictions mark the loss of global capitalist hegemonies which were naturalized by the temperate Holocene climate and attempt to improvise alternative social modes.