Critical questions about the relation between literature and climate are relevant both before and after the rise of environmentalism and today’s climate politics. How does literature write the encounter between biological bodies and climate? What trends in literary form and content do critics track when they study climate change? What concepts have they then created or rethought? To answer these questions, we need to look outside the contemporary moment and compare historical periods. This chapter looks at four topics: the ‘superorganism’, the climate theory of race, the concepts of ‘hyperobject’ and ‘trans-corporeality’, and the idea that literature can ‘model’ anthropogenic climates. The Anthropocene has certainly created new configurations of climate and embodiment coupled to changes in literary form, including what sort of narrative worlds seem real to their readers. But none of this is unprecedented. Present configurations of embodiment, climate, and form are still constrained by those of the past. Critics are only beginning to understand what they are, and how they change in historical time.

New materialism is a contested term, as its theoretical approaches diverge from each other while overlapping with many other theories in the nonhuman turn. This essay introduces new materialist theories and their relation to posthumanism by outlining their distinguishing characteristics, such as the conceptions of material agency.  It centers new materialism in feminist science studies, especially the work of Donna Haraway and Karen Barad.  The essay also takes up the question of whether or how new materialism is political, by analyzing the intersections between new materialisms and a range of other theories, topics, and orientations, including environmentalism, race, indigeneity, postcolonialist science studies, and disability studies.