A Fictional Risk Narrative and Its Potential for Social Resonance: Reception of Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior in Reviews and Reading Groups

  • Sonja Fücker
  • , Anna Auguscik
  • , Anton Kirchhofer
  • , Uwe Schimank

    Research output: Contributions to collected editions/worksContributions to collected editions/anthologiesResearchpeer-review

    Abstract

    Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior is one of the most prominent examples in the “currently emerging genre of the climate change novel” (Mayer 2014, 24; see also Trexler and Johns-Putra 2011). Published in 2012, it offers a complex comment on contemporary US-American risk discourses about climate change. Science, as represented in the novel, figures as a detector of ecological risks. At the same time, scientists are shown to lack the capacity for effectively communicating this knowledge to the general public. By representing science and scientists in this way, the novel may itself be read as taking on the task of informing...
    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationUnder the Literary Microscope : Science and Society in the Contemporary Novel
    EditorsSina Farzin, Susan Gaines, Ros Haynes
    Number of pages31
    Place of PublicationUniversity Park
    PublisherPennsylvania State University Press
    Publication date2021
    Pages218-248
    Article number10
    ISBN (Print)978-0-271-08978-2
    ISBN (Electronic)978-0-271-09011-5
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2021

    Research areas and keywords

    • Literature studies

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