A Different but Equally Catastrophic Crisis : How Literary Fiction Becomes Climate Fiction

For a few decades, ecology has been an ongoing issue, not only harming the Earth but also people’s mental health. Today more than ever, the impacts of climate change and the Anthropocene are studied in several fields, among which is literature. Since the 1970s, nature has been at the heart of ecocriticism, which applies ecological concepts to literature. This method allowed academics to interpret the place of nature in literature with regard to the physical world. Soon, the role of fiction was questioned: can environmental or climate fictions influence readers’ behaviors? Scholars, such as Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, tried to answer the question by working with empirical ecocriticism. He and his colleagues identified that literature could impact readers’ lives to some extent. However, since those readers were often already sensitive to the climate issue, they reacted in a predictable way. Consequently, it has become interesting to study the reception of fictions that were not directly related to climate change. To understand how readers behave regarding works of fiction, applying a method similar to empirical ecocriticism is necessary. In this regard, the Goodreads comments left on two classic novels, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, will be analyzed. This analysis will eventually conclude that a new readership has emerged who transforms literary fiction into climate fiction because of the omnipresence of today’s discourse of the Anthropocene.