Julia Hoydis Bücher

Taking the cue from the currency of risk in popular and interdisciplinary academic discourse, this book explores the development of the English novel in relation to the emergence and institutionalization of risk, from its origins in probability theory in the late seventeenth century to the global ‘risk society’ in the twenty-first century. Focussing on 29 novels from Defoe to McEwan, this book argues for the contemporaneity of the rise of risk and the novel and suggests that there is much to gain from reading the risk society from a diachronic, literary-cultural perspective. Tracing changes and continuities, the fictional case studies reveal the human preoccupation with safety and control of the future. They show the struggle with uncertainties and the construction of individual or collective ‘logics’ of risk, which oscillate between rational calculation and emotion, helplessness and denial, and an enabling or destructive sense of adventure and danger. Advancing the study of risk in fiction beyond the confinement to dystopian disaster narratives, this book shows how topical notions, such as chance and probability, uncertainty and responsibility, fears of decline and transgression, all cluster around risk.

The book examines the intersection of the English novel and the concept of risk, tracing its evolution from late seventeenth-century probability theory to the contemporary global 'risk society.' By analyzing 29 novels from authors like Defoe and McEwan, it highlights the human concerns surrounding safety, control, and uncertainties. The narrative explores how characters navigate the complexities of risk, balancing rational thought with emotional responses, and reveals broader themes of chance, responsibility, and societal fears, moving beyond traditional dystopian narratives.

This Element presents a necessary intervention within the rapidly expanding field of research in the environmental humanities on climate change and environmental literacy. In contrast to the dominant, science-centred literacy debates, which largely ignore the unique resources of the humanities, it asks: How does literary reading contribute to climate change communication? How does this contribution relate to recent demands for environmental and related literacies? Rather than reducing the function of literature to a more pleasurable form of information transfer or its affective dimension of evoking sympathy, climate change literacy thoroughly reassesses the cognitive, affective, and pedagogic potentials of literary writing. It does so by analysing a selection of popular climate novels and by demonstrating the role of fiction in fostering a more adequate understanding of, and response to, climate change. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Amitav Ghosh is one of India's most eminent literary voices. The wide array of themes, times and places covered in his narratives deserves critical attention. The author's interest in science, anthropology, historiography, and the travelling of people and ideas suggest an approach which highlights the concern with border-crossings and the excavation of 'other' histories. Encompassing all of Ghosh's fictions from the early experimental novels like 'The Circle of Reason' and 'The Calcutta Chromosome' to the later epics like 'The Glass Palace' and 'Sea of Poppies', this study offers a reading focusing on the intrinsic link between ethics and storytelling. Positioning itself in relation to the ethical turn within postcolonial and postmodern criticism, it employs K. A. Appiah's cosmopolitanism and Levinas' ethics of alterity in a framework revealing the syncretic (hi)stories which potentially undo the partition of peoples, nations, or faiths while seeking a neo-humanist, global outlook.