The introduction traces the emergence of new forms of the near future to the global financial crisis of 2008 and ensuing events, linked to an urgent awareness of coming and needed change in relation to global environmental crisis. It argues that by merging the Anthropocene with the broader contemporary field, the near future provides a better means of understanding how global warming makes its presence felt in fiction than does a focus on ‘climate fiction’ alone. Two major themes shape contemporary culture’s relationship to the Anthropocene: the prospect of radical change, and of a broad collective. A large number of works, explored through the first half of the book as the ‘domestic near future’, recoil from the prospect of such cooperation and such change. The second half reads a set of fictions which do try to imagine new kinds of collectivity, and radical change, though they frequently struggle to find a generic form adequate to the task. In these cases, the near future acts more like the emergent form that Raymond Williams hypothesised, underlining the link between the emergent near future as narrative genre, and the cultural shift to which such a genre might correspond.

Gerard Woodward explores Plath’s complex relationship with the culture of food and cookery on both sides of the Atlantic and helps us to understand the ways in which food works in her poetry and fiction. Plath was a compulsive observer and cataloguer of what she ate and what she cooked. Yet the times she lived in were ones of great contrasts and upheavals in the social and cultural attitudes towards food in Britain and the United States. In Plath’s birth country food remained central to the American ideal of wholesomeness, represented most emphatically by Rombauer and Becker’s The Joy of Cooking, which Plath treasured. In Britain the national cuisine had been devastated by the Second World War and years of rationing. At the same time, in both countries, food was slowly acquiring new powers as a marker of status and aspiration, particularly for women.