As a traveler, Elizabeth Bishop valued direct experience and the particularity of other cultures, key elements of anthropology. During her residence in Brazil, she drew on anthropological works of Richard Burton, Gilberto Freyre, Charles Wagley and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Introducing her translation of Minha Vida de Menina, she cited Burton’s Brazilian travels. She thought Freyre “really gives one some idea what it’s like” to live in Brazil, but, like him, ventured into controversy about race and class in several works, notably “Manuelzinho.” Wagley’s Amazon Town was a direct source of her poem “The Riverman,” articulating her regard for the intuitive power of dreams and dreamlike experience in folk arts and in poems. In works such as “Questions of Travel” and “Crusoe in England,” Bishop reveals her affinity with the skepticism of Lévi-Strauss in Tristes Tropiques. Both articulate doubts about modernity and our mastery of knowledge.

This chapter explores the relationship between Shakespeare and climate. Taking its inspiration from weather disruptions to the 2017 Shakespeare Association of America conference, it riffs on the tweets that this climatic disturbance generated and the themes they reveal. It deals with the issues of: climate and its material effects on Shakespearean composition and performance, whereby climate and culture may be said to be co-constitutive; the resistance in Shakespeare’s time to codifying climate, in partial acknowledgement of climate’s unpredictability; and thus the extent to which Shakespearean texts portend human and non-human entanglement in the Anthropocene.

This chapter outlines the ways in which historical traditions of climatic medicine influenced nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial discourses. It further examines three authors’ engagements with and reaction to these discourses, in both fictional and non-fictional literatures of empire. Rather than simply recapitulating pro-imperial uses of climate science, works by Richard Burton, Joseph Conrad, and Rudyard Kipling all ‘map’ race and climate in a way that reflects the ambivalences and contradictions at the heart of colonial discourse. Further, this chapter analyses the imaginative potential provided by the structures of fiction for authors like Conrad and Kipling to grapple with concepts of chronic disease, bodily transformation, adaptation, and degeneration in Africa and India.