This essay argues for an energy literary criticism that centers the problem of the energy epoch as the problem of the color line. It does so by reading a set of novels—Helena María Viramontes's Under the Feet of Jesus (1995) and Colson Whitehead's Zone One (2011) and The Underground Railroad (2016)—as fossil fuel fictions that illuminate the conjuncture of energy and racial capitalism. These works unearth the racialized world making of extractive energy regimes by articulating energy's social production of race across the colonial histories and geographies of the Anthropocene. The entanglement of racialized bodies and hydrocarbon matter across biological, historical, and geological time scales in these novels formalizes what Kathryn Yusoff calls the “geologies of race.” Excavating the racial infrastructures scaffolding the Anthropocene's power grids, Viramontes's and Whitehead's georacial imaginations envision decolonial and abolitionist energy futures for Brown and Black lives.

Climate-change discourse is suffused with a profound sense of loss, amid accelerating ecological degradation. While some ecocritics consider the elegy an apt means of narrativizing these losses, others call for genres capable of moving beyond mourning. I argue that the Bildungsroman—which typically depicts a protagonist who undergoes a transformational journey following crisis and eventually comes to terms with the world—may narrativize the process of moving beyond climate grief and adapting to a changed world. I indicate a corpus of novels that may be termed “climate Bildungsromane,” which envision various transformations following climate grief. Through an analysis of one significant example, Jenni Fagan's The Sunlight Pilgrims, I explore climate Bildungsromane's tendency to narrate the journey from ecocatastrophe to adaptation through a fusion of modern scientific rationality with forms of belief and storytelling commonly considered premodern. I contemplate how and why this seeming paradox surfaces across cultural imaginings of journeys beyond climate grief.

This essay argues for the primacy of energy as an impetus in the writing of the Sudanese author al-Tayyib Salih. Taking his most famous novel, موسم الهجرة إلى الشمال (1966; Mawsim al-hijra ilā al-shimāl; Season of Migration to the North), as a case study, it explores the significance of climatic factors and of changes to energy regimes in the novel's plot, characterization, intertextuality, and postcolonial critique. Through the character of Mustafa Saʿid, it argues for a posthuman impulse in the novel, as Mustafa uncannily transforms from Faustian archetype to a fantastical, nonhuman force. It concludes by shifting to alternative forms of energy within Salih's writing, as the spiritual energy of the Sufi “unseen” meets the unheeding world of atoms, supercharged with new energies in the modern era.

This study approaches Henry David Thoreau as a model housekeeper whose genderqueer housekeeping generates nonexpansionary modes of relation. I bring together Thoreau’s biography, reception history, queer literary history, and ecolinguistics to resituate Walden within, rather than against, the popular discourse of domestic economy. By restoring Thoreau’s connections with conventional femininity, one can begin to see how his housekeeping, gardening, and animal husbandry in Walden expand his sense of kinship and give rise to a radically social environmental practice. By playing with the boundary between house and habitat, Thoreau frugally expands his affections and comforts without expanding his ecological footprint.

This article argues that Omar El Akkad’s debut novel, American War (2017), offers insight into the possibilities of trauma fiction in the twenty-first century. American War is analyzed as a case study for the trauma novel of the twenty-first century—a literary exploration of future and ongoing trauma, rather than a text “working through” a past event. The novel offers as well an unrelenting image of the cost of refusals of care in the early twenty-first century, the last decades in which the impending disaster might be averted. Queer affect theory inflects trauma studies in ways that allow us as readers to describe trauma that is systemic and ongoing; it also allows us to articulate the disproportionate effects of climate trauma on certain human communities, the physical and mental toll of such effects, and the necessity of bearing witness to climate trauma’s causes and consequences in ways that not only create space for but also call forth interventionist action.

Anthropocene criticism of Victorian literature has focused more on questions of temporality and predictability than on those related to climate in the nineteenth century. Climate knowledge is central to the regional novel, which is attuned to the seasonal basis of agriculture and sociality, but the formal influence of the British climate also becomes more apparent through a consideration of the genre's adaptation to colonial conditions. Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge highlights how a known seasonal cycle underpins the differentiation of climate and weather and explores the role of economic systems in mediating the experience of climate. Rolf Boldrewood's The Squatter's Dream, set amid the nonannual seasonal change of Australia, demonstrates the fracturing of the regional novel form under the stress of sustained drought. Such a comparative approach highlights the importance of regular seasonality as the basis of the Victorian novel's ability to conceptualize the relation of climate, weather, and capital.

This essay reads the poet Eileen Myles's recent turn to climate activism as an extension of their queer critique of predatory urban change on Manhattan's Lower East Side, where they have lived since the 1970s. Myles's climate activism opposes the demolition of Manhattan's East River Park to facilitate one of New York City's first large-scale climate resiliency projects. Myles argues that residents’ desires should shape climate resiliency planning priorities. I read Myles's earlier poems and essays to describe how the queer persistence and the attention to the “now” of urban change that they develop in response to New York's housing crisis in the 1980s during the early era of AIDS inform their climate activism. I argue that the environmental humanities tools needed to represent climate change on an urbanizing planet are inextricable from a queer theory approach to sustaining desire and loss amid precarity, as becomes apparent through Myles's writing.

This essay is born of the belief that racial justice, social justice, and environmental justice are mutually entangled. Despite their shared commitments to justice, early modern ecocriticism and premodern critical race studies have rarely been in conversation with each other. We address this aporia here and ponder how such intersections can create pathways to more inclusive futures for early modern studies, and for literary studies more broadly. We begin with a brief reflection about how we came to these topics; we then turn to literary and critical works that illustrate the interconnectedness of these issues in premodern literature and explore how those connections persist and haunt our own thinking and writing. This essay is not argumentative in the traditional sense, but rather invites our scholarly communities to unlearn our way to different possibilities.

Ecocritical scholars and environmental scientists contend that the earliest detectable signs of anthropogenic global warming manifested as extreme fluctuations in global weather patterns and can be traced back to the 1930s. While modernist scholars have been hard pressed to find evidence of an ecological consciousness among canonical modernists during this decade, this essay demonstrates that Gertrude Stein left a copious and critical archive of climatic change in Everybody's Autobiography, published in 1937. In this lesser known “autobiography,” Stein recounts spectacular and mundane environmental upheavals while criticizing the West's epistemological dissociation of the weather from world events. Moreover, Stein offers an extraordinary reflection on modernity's “eternal” dependence on fossil fuels. By historically situating Stein's numerous weather reports within the political, scientific, environmental, and media discourses of the 1930s, this essay offers a portrait of Stein as an important cultural actor within the broader historiography of modern climate science.