Recent years have seen a veritable proliferation of studies in the environmental humanities. This surge reflects the material turn in both the humanities and social sciences – which has seen renewed interest in human interactions with, and stories about, the material world – and, relatedly, growing concerns about the ethical, social, and cultural effects of anthropogenic climate change. Kate Rigby's new book, Dancing with Disaster, is the most recent in a line of impressive titles on the subject, joining the likes of Ann Larabee's Decade of Disaster (2000), Frederick Buell's From Apocalypse to Way of Life: Environmental Crisis in the American Century (2003), Stephanie LeMenager, Teresa Shewry, and Ken Hiltner's Environmental Criticism for the 21st Century (2011), and Timothy Morton's Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (2013).

Like these titles, Dancing with Disaster attends to the relationship between the natural world and human narratives, exploring the ramifications of industrialization, agricultural expansion, colonialism, and the man-versus-nature binary in philosophy that grew in tandem with these. Rigby stands apart from her fellow scholars, however, in focussing on both human-made disasters and natural disasters that have shaped humans’ perception of the natural world as a fundamentally hostile place in need of taming. The book's central conceit, which gives it its title – that environmental disaster is in fact a ‘dance’ involving both human and nonhuman participants – beautifully illustrates how these two mutually reinforce each other: efforts to tame the wild in turn unbalance ecosystems and lead to even greater disruptions, which in turn become the stuff of folklore, myth, and collective fear. Rigby's attention to the cultural effects of, myth-making around, and literary representation of environmental catastrophes across the ages is both fascinating in and of itself, and a vital means for contextualizing (for example) the preponderance of bush fires in contemporary Australia, or the endurance of anthropocentric attitudes to nature. The book's greatest strength is its recognition that to truly understand any one environmental disaster, one must view it as a tapestry of different narrative strands: geophysical factors pre-dating human settlement, colonial relations, religion, industrial technology, and local folklore all have their part to play.

The structure of Dancing with Disaster reflects this ethos: each chapter addresses the history and representation of a specific environmental disaster (the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755, the Black Death, the Great Hallig Flood of 1825, colonial disordering of Aboriginal fire regimes in Australia from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, and the tropical cyclones that have increasingly plagued Australia in the last forty years), through close readings of a range of literary texts.

In the opening chapter, Rigby reads Heinrich von Kleist's novella The Earthquake in Chile (1806), alongside accounts of the Lisbon Earthquake by Voltaire, Rousseau, and Kant to convey both the sheer variety of views the Romantics had about the material world and the role that the Lisbon Earthquake played in shaping them. Kleist's novella is paradigmatic of this influence, “problematiz[ing] the emergent concept of natural disaster” (40) by rejecting both divine intervention and human fallibility as sole causes. Rigby convincingly argues that the origins of self-reflexive art itself lie as much in the epistemological rupture caused by the Lisbon Earthquake as in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (50).

Similarly astute analyses follow in the subsequent chapters. In chapter 2, Rigby demonstrates how Mary Shelley's depiction, in The Last Man (1826), of a human-made pandemic prefigures current debates around human beings’ role in epidemics such as mad cow disease. In the following chapter, she reads Theodor Storm's novella The Dykemaster (1888), in relation to the geophysical and economic history of Storm's natal North Frisia, whose settlement by farming communities between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries – what she terms a “dance of people, plants, animals, wind and sea” (90) – altered the environment and led to repeated mass flooding. The chapter on Australian bush fires meanwhile provides a nuanced account of the continent's changing demographics over the course of the last two centuries, and of the shifts in both Aborigines’ and Australians’ perception of where responsibility for these lies. Finally, the last chapter, on cyclones, examines more closely the ramifications of industrial modernity for the planet's future, attending specifically to the problem of representing these consequences in literature. Rigby notes, in fact, that while “speculative fiction in the burgeoning subgenre of ‘cli fi’ offers opportunities for imagining a climate-changed future,” what remains uncertain is whether such fiction is capable of “com[ing] to grips with so complex and amorphous a socioecological phenomenon” (147).

Through these analyses, Rigby provides a compelling portrait of our evolving relationship with our material environs. Lucid, thoughtful, and eloquently written, Dancing with Disaster will be of interest to scholars across the environmental humanities, cultural studies, and literature from Romanticism to the present day.