Writing the Climate Crisis as Skeptical Romance

Abstract

My transdisciplinary study grafts a Miltonic and Shakespearean understanding of romance as a literary mode into an analytical framework for conceptualizing narratives about climate change. I examine the arguments of Anthropocene theorists such as Donna Haraway and literary theorists including Amitav Ghosh who describe how the stories we tell ourselves about nature break down when it comes to telling collective stories about climate change. I argue instead that ever since the age of classical Greece, literary romance has provided a methodology through which to navigate disaster, that these classical narrative techniques were revitalized during the Protestant Reformation, the European Renaissance, and the British Civil War, and that many modern narratives about climate change and how to survive it cleave to the structures and strategies of epistemological romance (a term intended to differentiate my subject from bodice-ripping pulpy Harlequin novels. I am referring to a particular mode of experimental writing designed to educate its protagonist into skeptical, experiential knowledge through episodic suffering). This thesis examines a 17th century British romance (navigating the British Civil War), a 20th century Chinese romance (navigating Mao’s Cultural Revolution) alongside contemporary 21st stories about climate catastrophe from England, China, and the US, arguing that US storytelling about climate change is reabsorbing romantic storytelling techniques from elsewhere around the globe. This thesis in no way asserts that the mode of romantic storytelling it describes is limited to England or China;I just happen to be a British Literature scholar who is also diasporically Chinese. This document analyzes these stories through a writer’s eyes, arguing that many of the storytelling techniques and stories we already know best can be tuned to contemporary collaborative stories about climate crisis and climate consolation.