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Abstract
ABSTRACT How has public discourse about climate change evolved? This paper answers this question through the paradigmatic case of British heatwaves. These are traditionally considered a fortunate break from dull weather, making them a least likely case for the emergency of a discourse of doom. With a topic-modeling analysis of British national newspaper articles on heatwaves from 1985 until 2023 (N = 35,127), we show that a longstanding Romantic heatwave discourse eventually buckled, and that Apocalypticism finally became the dominant genre in the last decade. A supplementary hermeneutic analysis then indicates and explains complexity within this broad trend. 1980s stories already noted routine heatwave problems, while many recent ones continue depicting positive lifestyle implications. Within the Apocalyptic genre itself climate change is today deemed a factual causal force, whereas in the 1980s and 1990s it was a possible carrier of future dangers. In connecting the genre perspective from literary theory to big data method topic modelling, our approach is parsimonious, novel and replicable in other national contexts.
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