Book contents
- The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Climate
- The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Climate
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- Part I Historical Shifts in Climate Consciousness
- 1 Seasonal Processions
- 2 Literal and Literary Atmospheres
- 3 Weathers of Body and World
- Part II Current Issues in Climate Change Criticism
- Part III Ways of Telling Climate Stories
- Part IV Dialogic Perspectives on Emerging Questions
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Companions to …
3 - Weathers of Body and World
Reading Difference in Literary Atmospheres before Climate Change
from Part I - Historical Shifts in Climate Consciousness
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 March 2022
- The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Climate
- The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Climate
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- Part I Historical Shifts in Climate Consciousness
- 1 Seasonal Processions
- 2 Literal and Literary Atmospheres
- 3 Weathers of Body and World
- Part II Current Issues in Climate Change Criticism
- Part III Ways of Telling Climate Stories
- Part IV Dialogic Perspectives on Emerging Questions
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Companions to …
Summary
This chapter outlines three methods for reading climate and weather in literary texts while resisting both universalism and anachronism. First, climatological reading focuses on genre, while also drawing on the poststructuralist feminist and antiracist method of making specific absences present. In contrast, meteorological reading harnesses the rhetorical terms metaphor and metonymy to carefully parse the weather’s localised specificities. The concept ‘weathering’ is then introduced to bridge the historical spatial and temporal distinction between climate and weather. Throughout, the chapter demonstrates how to connect readings of power and difference to an analysis of climate and weather. The methods are described by engaging with a range of literary historians, theorists, and ecocritics and illustrated by way of the reading of two famously weatherworn canonical texts, Wuthering Heights and King Lear, and lesser-known pieces by Claudia Rankine and Simone de Beauvoir.
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- The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Climate , pp. 55 - 68Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022