Book contents
- Whiteness and American Literature
- Cambridge Themes in American Literature and Culture
- Whiteness and American Literature
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Whiteness and National Identity
- Part II Whiteness in the American Literary Imagination
- Chapter 8 Whiteness in Nineteenth-Century Speculative Writing
- Chapter 9 Whiteness and the Slave Narrative
- Chapter 10 Passing in Modernist Literature
- Chapter 11 Whiteness in African American Writers’ Nonfictional Works
- Chapter 12 The Historical Novel of Whiteness
- Chapter 13 The Unbearable Whiteness of Contemporary US Climate Fiction
- Chapter 14 The Twenty-First-Century White Life Novel
- Part III Approaches to Whiteness
- Further Reading
- Index
Chapter 13 - The Unbearable Whiteness of Contemporary US Climate Fiction
from Part II - Whiteness in the American Literary Imagination
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 June 2025
Edited by
Book contents
- Whiteness and American Literature
- Cambridge Themes in American Literature and Culture
- Whiteness and American Literature
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Whiteness and National Identity
- Part II Whiteness in the American Literary Imagination
- Chapter 8 Whiteness in Nineteenth-Century Speculative Writing
- Chapter 9 Whiteness and the Slave Narrative
- Chapter 10 Passing in Modernist Literature
- Chapter 11 Whiteness in African American Writers’ Nonfictional Works
- Chapter 12 The Historical Novel of Whiteness
- Chapter 13 The Unbearable Whiteness of Contemporary US Climate Fiction
- Chapter 14 The Twenty-First-Century White Life Novel
- Part III Approaches to Whiteness
- Further Reading
- Index
Summary
Contemporary US climate fiction articulates the climate crisis as a whiteness crisis. It often represents white, mostly privileged, characters and communities becoming destabilized, if not undone, by climate catastrophe. The existential precarity long experienced by people of color in the US and elsewhere is often figured in US climate fiction as a white apocalypse. This essay focuses on how contemporary US climate fiction stages confrontations with whiteness. Focusing on first-person narratives by Lauren Groff, Jenny Offill, and Ben Lerner that foreground a privileged whiteness by making it hypervisible, it analyzes how climate fiction not only reifies whiteness but also reflects, demystifies, and disrupts it. By submitting whiteness to the spotlight, these texts allow whiteness to become available for investigation and interrogation. The extent to which such critiques end up reifying or recuperating whiteness, however, remains a pressing question.
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- Whiteness and American Literature , pp. 191 - 204Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2025
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