The New Poetics of Climate Change Modernist Aesthetics for a Warming World

Climate change is the greatest crisis of our time – and yet too often writing on the subject is separated off as 'environmental' writing, divorced from culture, society and politics. The New Poetics of Climate Change argues that the reality of global warming presents us with a fundamental challenge to the way we read and write poetry in the modern age.

In this important new book, Matthew Griffiths demonstrates the ways in which modernism's radical reinvigorations of literary form over the last century represents 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 such as Michael Symmons Roberts and Jorie Graham, Griffiths explores how modernist modes help us describe and engage with the terrifying dynamics of a warming world and offer a poetics of our climate.

1. Introduction: Climate Changes Everything
i. The Climate Change Poem
ii. Ecocriticism and Climate Change
iii. What Reading in a Changing Climate Entails
iv. A Mode for Writing Climate Change
2. From Modernism to Climate Criticism
i. Ecocritical Modernism?
ii. The Modes of Modernism: Irony, Globalisation, Identity, Fragmentation, Time
iii. The Abstraction of Water: The Changing Climate of The Waste Land
3. Wallace Stevens's Fictions of Our Climate
i. Ecocriticism on Stevens
ii. Some Poems of Our Climate
iii. Models for Atmospheric Apprentices
iv. Notes Towards a Poetics of Our Climate
4. Basil Bunting and Nature's Discord
i. Nature in Bunting's Romantic Modernism
ii. An Economy of the Elements and the Poetics of Entropy
iii. Humanity in a Boundaryless Nature
iv. Remapping Disrupted Orders
5. David Jones's Anathemata and the Gratuitous Environment
i. Poetry versus Progressivism
ii. The Fractal Form
iii. Allusion in the Anthropocene
iv. Contingent Culture
6. Poems of Our Climate Change
i. Climate Change Discourse: Forms and Frames
ii. Commissioning Climate Concern in Feeling the Pressure
iii. Modernist Poetics and Jorie Graham's Sea Change
7. Conclusion: Ecocriticism Reads Modernism, Modernism Reads Ecocriticism
Bibliography
Index

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