Novel Metabolisms: Environmental Fiction in the Molecular Age
How twenty-first-century environmental novels explore the tensions between personal and planetary sustainability
At a moment when environmentalist discourse has placed the blame for climate change squarely at the feet of rich nation-states and corporations, why do so many recent environmental novels dwell in the home and kitchen? In Novel Metabolisms, Molly MacVeagh illuminates how the repeated actions of domestic life depicted in these stories--cooking, cleaning, and other forms of household labor--are synonymous with the interchange of food, energy, waste, and work that sustains our planet. Fiction becomes a space where authors interrogate the complexities that arise from these sites of coexisting personal and societal activity, especially when what a character needs to sustain their life clashes with what the planet needs to sustain its future.
MacVeagh analyzes contemporary works by Raven Leilani, Louise Erdrich, Eleanor Catton, Lucy Ellmann, C Pam Zhang, and others to explore how their novels play out tensions between the body and the planet while their characters process what it means to navigate global environmental collapse. Drawing on metabolic discourses from nineteenth-century soil science to contemporary diet culture, Novel Metabolisms exposes how the formal quirks of the realist novel formulate nuanced sustainability narratives by casting maintenance as action. With a renewed focus on readerly agency, these readings interrogate what environmental fiction can offer in the fight against climate change.
Reimagining domestic labor practices like cooking, cleaning, and gardening as sites of environmental engagement, Novel Metabolisms integrates concepts of metabolic activity with literary analysis to show how novels can break apart the present--and in the process release the energy to create something new.
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