America’s wars have always prompted works of literature that confront the subject of death and commemoration. This essay opens with an overview of relevant genres and conventions, both in poetry and prose, spawned by America’s bloodiest conflict, the Civil War. Attention then turns to various memorial texts during World War I, and book-length literary responses to death during the Great War, World War II, and the American War in Vietnam. The essay highlights personal and public interpretations of death in Melville’s Battlepieces and Aspects of the War, World War I-era representations of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Hemingway’s “Cat in the Rain” and Across the River and Into the Trees, and Bobbie Ann Mason’s In Country.

This chapter discusses the relationship between nuclear literature and criticism on the one hand and climate fiction and criticism on the other. It demonstrates, first, a long-standing preoccupation in nuclear texts with weather and climate, suggesting that nuclear literature might usefully be considered a special subcategory of climate fiction. It then deals with a thriving - and relatively new - tradition of nuclear criticism and theory. It shows how, by opening up three key problematics (nuclear geographies, nuclear temporalities, and nuclear subjectivities), nuclear criticism brings into focus the interdependence of global and local, the significance of deep time, and how humans are produced by their interactions with technology and nature. This critical tradition can feed usefully into an understanding of climate fiction.

This chapter outlines the emergence of climate fiction and its key modes. It pays particular attention to the extent to which climate fiction has worked within the established conventions of literary realism, meeting the many representational challenges mounted by climate change. While it considers the extent to which realism is able to render the abstract and intangible phenomenon of climate change visible, it argues that there is also a significant body of writing on the subject which turns to alternative forms and narrative strategies in the effort to represent climate change, and manages to overcome some of the limitations of realism. In other words, where climate fiction meets the challenges of representing climate change, it has the potential to provide a space in which to address the Anthropocene’s emotional, ethical, and practical concerns.