English: Early Climate Fiction

<p>Please note that Swedish is not a requirement to take this course.</p><p>In this course, we will read a variety of texts in terms of how these works depict and theorize the environment, and we will examine concepts such as "environment", "apocalypse", "climate", and "environmentalism" in terms of how they are imagined, shaped, and created by specific cultural contexts. As an academic practice and a theoretical model, ecocriticism first manifested itself in 1990s era studies of eigtheenth and nineteenth-century literature and culture in English. Environmentalism, as a social movement, is a product of the 1960s and was sparked in the United States by Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. In the twenty-first century, ecocriticism has developed into a burgeoning field at many universities around the world. In this course, we will study early climate fiction in English, seeking to redefine the genre not as an innovation of the late twentieth century but rather a continuation of the earlier impulses in science fiction that began in the late 1800s. We will cover well-known authors such as Edgar Allan Poe and H. G. Wells and less well-known ones such as Clare Winger Harris and Thea von Harbou.</p>