Much as the complexities of climate change and the Anthropocene have queried the limits and exclusions of literary representation, so, too, have the challenges recently presented by climate activism and intersectional environmentalism, animal rights, and even the ‘thing-power’ (as Jane Bennett puts it) of material forms like oil, plastic, and heavy metals. Social and protest movements have revived the question of whether there can be such a thing as an activist ecocriticism. These movements resurrect a still-unanswered question first posed by Jonathan Bate in 1991: can ecocriticism only concern itself with consciousness, or might it politicise literary criticism in a new way?

Attempting to respond, this volume coalesces around three interrelated strands: material ecologies, past and present British politics, and the act of writing itself. Contributors consider the ways in which literary form has foregrounded the complexities of both matter (in essays on water, sugar, and land) and political economics (from empire and nationalism to environmental justice movements and local and regional communities). The volume asks how life writing, nature writing, creative nonfiction, and autobiography, although genres entrenched in capitalist political realities, can also confront these by reinserting personal experience. Through such personal narratives, the volume addresses the extent to which literary ecocriticism might support Extinction Rebellion’s fifth principle, of establishing a cycle of ‘action, reflection and learning, and planning for more action’, to help repair a near fatally damaged world. Can we bring a more sustainable planet into being by focusing on those literary forms which can imagine the conditions and systems needed to do so?

The first three essays focus on place. Mark Frost looks at Victorian reworkings of the pastoral in novels by Harriet Martineau, George Eliot, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charlotte Brontë, whose innovations in genre help to reveal the operation and impact of political economy. Set in the industrialised coun tryside of the Midlands or North, the novels strip away pastoral’s idyllic idealisation of country life to reveal the ‘accelerating intersections of town and country’, and the imposition of environmental exploitation, air pollution, and economic globalisation. More broadly, they expose a mechanism of environmental sovereignty, an assumed ‘unquestioned right to do as we will with everything we describe as nonhuman and label as resource’, says Frost, a label which encompasses both industry and farming. Hence, these novels expose what Elizabeth Miller has called extractivist ecologies, a way of life that proceeds by depleting the future.

The contemporary ecological crisis is also a crisis of human perception, representation, and agency. We are required to make frenetic alterations of scale, adjusting our daily experiences, actions and lifestyles to ever-changing global and atmospheric patterns and impacts. Yet the polysemy of climate and its diffuse presence in our lives – as extreme weather event, day-to-day expectation, scientific data, or urgent socio-political issue – also makes it amenable to multi-media or transmedia dissemination. Analogously, digital media is itself characterised by movement across and between microscopic (tweets, data) and macroscopic levels – i.e. a digital sphere marked simultaneously by ‘infowhelm’ and the possibility of mass global, networked, and resistant communities. This exploratory survey ranges from the quotidian dimensions of digital and online media – how changes in climate are being recorded and registered in tweets, blogs, and citizen science – to deeper qualitative storytelling formats adapted from and sometimes in dialogue with old media. The latter include online self-published fiction, podcasting (e.g. the BBC audio drama Forest 404), and personal ‘climate stories’ and testimonies. Ultimately, this essay argues for the continued importance, and potential agency, of human-scale perspectives on micro- and macroscopic ecological complexities and for preserving distinct, often maligned human modes of narrative and storytelling.

Drawing attention to the Anthropocene as both proposed geological epoch and discourse about the Earth’s future, the Introduction examines the Anthropocene’s challenge to the value of literature and literary criticism and the opportunity it offers to reinvigorate both. It works from and summarises the chapters in the book while highlighting arguments and perspectives from Anthropocene studies in literature and environmental humanities. Citing diverse writers, it argues that literature can deploy its unique practices (narrative, poetics, etc.) and faculty for imagining the future towards an understanding of humans’ interconnection with the Earth that the Anthropocene demands; and that it can best do so by adapting and evolving those practices towards sharing divergent experiences (e.g. stories of people and species disseminated online) and, via (say) experimental poetry or elongated narrative, relating human beings to exponentially vaster scales: deep history, Earth, the distant future. The Introduction concludes with a case study of Chile which underlines literature's and culture’s value in mediating the complex social, cultural and ontological questions that the Anthropocene poses.