Helena Duffy (MSt Oxon, PhD Oxford Brookes) is Professor of French at the University of Wrocaw, Poland. Her research on the cultural representations of World War II and the Holocaust has resulted in the publication of the monographs World War II in Andreï Makine's Historiographic Metafiction (2018) and The Holocaust in French Postmodern Fiction (2022). She has edited issues of French Forum, Journal of Holocaust Research, and Eastern European Holocaust Studies, and, with Avril Tynan, has co-edited a collection of essays, Trauma, Ethics, Hermeneutics (2024).

Katarina Leppänen is Professor of Intellectual History and the Head of the Department of Literature, Intellectual History and Religion at the University Gothenburg, Sweden. Her ongoing project deals with the importance of literary transnational, international, and regional exchanges in the Nordic and Baltic countries in the early twentieth century. Titled 'Cosmopolitan and Vernacular Dynamics in World Literature,' the project is funded by the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences.

Notes on contributors

Introduction: storying the ecocatastrophe: from doomand-gloom scenarios to messages of hope

HELENA DUFFY

1 Daily life and global crisis: human experience and narrative fiction in the age of the Anthropocene

MARKKU LEHTIMÄKI

2 Feelings of hope and helplessness in Knut Faldbakken's and Maja Lunde's climate change novels: an econarratological reading

GEORGIANA BOZÎNTAN

3 Narrating the economic value of nature in the Anthropocene

XIN LIU

4 Building a new world on the ruins of Helsinki: critical utopia in Annika Luther's The City of the Homeless

KATARINA LEPPÄNEN

5 Extreme climate and the anthropocentric conception of agency in cinematic ocean planets

FAEZE REZAII

6 The radiant future or the end of history? The (eco)politics of Antoine Volodine's novel Radiant Terminus

HELENA DUFFY

7 The nuclear disaster as metaphor for the impending ecocatastrophe in anticipatory fiction from Luxembourg

SÉBASTIAN THILTGES

8 Speculating on ecological futures: narratives of hope and multispecies justice in contemporary ecofiction

ELIZABETH TAVELLA

9 Nature and masculinity in Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer: writing an ethical shift in environmental perception

CHLOÉ BOUR--LANG

10 Backward looking is necessarily organic: female artists revisit traumatic pasts and reimagine present and future alliances

KATARZYNA BOJARSKA

11 'Ruined and wrecked!': Annie Proulx confronts the ecocatastrophe

HANNAH JOCELYN

12 Congolese Anthropocenes, wounds of extraction, arts of resistance: transcultural materialism in Fiston Mujila's Tram 83 and Sammy Baloji's The Beautiful Time

SPRING ULMER

Afterword: one must cultivate one's own garden

HELENA DUFFY

Index