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From Elegy to Climate Bildungsroman: Jenni Fagan's The Sunlight Pilgrims

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 April 2025

Nandita Mahajan
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Abstract

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.

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Essay
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PMLA , Volume 140 , Issue 1 , January 2025 , pp. 52 - 70
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Copyright © 2025 The Author(s). Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Modern Language Association of America

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