Accommodating the Anthropocene: the home as a site of ecological significance in climate fiction

Abstract

ABSTRACT In its analysis of the home as a site of ecological significance in twenty-first-century climate fiction, this article focuses on three novels that explore the interstices of a changing climate, economic vulnerability, and the loss of the physical home. Using Andrew McGahan’s The White Earth, Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones, and Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior, the article explores the ways in which the domestic effects of climate change challenge both apathy and denial of the current climate emergency. The destruction of the home in all three novels raises questions surrounding precarity and perishability, and affords us an opportunity to explore what is meant by survival in light of climate change and the domestic and ecological effects of the Anthropocene. In doing so, we move beyond discussions of simply surviving in times of economic austerity and environmental uncertainty, and question whether seemingly bleak narratives also contain messages of hope and resilience.