The New Poetics of Climate Change

Modernist Aesthetics for a Warming World

Matthew Griffiths

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781350099470
• eBook ISBN: 9781474282116
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Climate change is the greatest issue of our time – and yet too often literature on the subject is considered only in the bracket of 'environmental' writing, divorced from culture, society and politics. The New Poetics of Climate Change argues instead that the emergence of global warming presents a fundamental challenge to the way we read and write poetry – the way we think – in the modern age. In this important new book, Matthew Griffiths demonstrates that Modernism's radical reinvigorations of literary form over the last century represent an engagement with key intellectual questions that we still need to address if we are to comprehend the scale and complexity of climate change. Through an extended examination of Modernist poetry, including the work of T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Basil Bunting and David Jones, and their influence on present-day poets including Jorie Graham, Griffiths explores how Modernist modes can help us describe and engage with the terrifying dynamics of a warming world and offer a poetics of our climate.

Table of contents

• FC
• Half title
• Environmental Cultures Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Climate Changes Everything
• 2 A New Climate for Modernism
• 3 Wallace Stevens’s Fictions of Our Climate
• 4 Basil Bunting and Nature’s Discord
• 5 David Jones’s Anathemata and the Gratuitous Environment
• 6 The Poems of Our Climate Change
• Conclusion: The New Poetics of Climate Change
• Notes
• References
• Index