The Anthropocene is a proposed geological epoch marking humanity's alteration of the Earth: its rock structure, environments, atmosphere. The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Anthropocene offers the most comprehensive survey yet of how literature can address the social, cultural, and philosophical questions posed by the Anthropocene. This volume addresses the old and new literary forms - from novels, plays, poetry, and essays to exciting and evolving genres such as 'cli-fi', experimental poetry, interspecies design, gaming, weird, ecotopian and petro-fiction, and 'new' nature writing. Studies range from the United States to India, from Palestine to Scotland, while addressing numerous global signifiers or consequences of the Anthropocene: catastrophe, extinction, 'fossil capital', warming, politics, ethics, interspecies relations, deep time, and Earth. This unique Companion offers a compelling account of how to read literature through the Anthropocene and of how literature might yet help us imagine a better world.

‘Recommended.’

J. Bilbro Source: Choice Magazine

‘Altogether, the highly worthwhile essays collected in this volume avoid falling into the trap of many recent publications that use the Anthropocene as backdrop … The Companion thus successfully conveys what sets Anthropocene scholarship apart from ‘just’ an environmental lens: an engagement with materiality of the Earth, media-technologies, historicity and futurity, scale and narrative, activism, and a wider pool of disciplines used to bring these knowledges together. Most importantly, the volume avoids perpetuating a universalist decline-narrative so often criticised in the Anthropocene debate.’

Kathrin Bartha-Mitchell Source: Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment