This introduction sets out the volume’s main contention that any analysis of climate and literature must not only deal with the many ways in which climate has been conceptualised but also frame those conceptualisations as a pre-history to climate emergency. It chronicles first the vexed genealogy of climate and literature, showing how this history proceeds unevenly through expectations around, variously, climate’s agency as a felt presence, its status as data or index, and its betokening of an impossibly complex global system. It then considers the literary and literary-critical fields, arguing for the need to contextualise these both in the here and now of climate crisis and in the longer pre-history of climate concepts. It then introduces the chapters in this volume, which simultaneously look back on this terrain and forward into a fraught world. Ultimately, if the history of climate and literature is one of climate’s various conceptualisations as agency, index, and system, this introduction, like the volume as a whole, argues for the potential of literature to depict systems conversion – not merely the future potential for disastrous global environmental failure but rather the means to reinvent it.

This chapter considers the possibility of a form of literary realism fit for the Anthropocene, which would not only allow readers to participate and intervene in the disclosure of climate catastrophe but would also position them within a climate-conscious collective. It begins with a brief discussion of realism, particularly its reliance, as analysed by Fredric Jameson, on an interplay between readerly engagement with actions and consequences and readerly empathy with experiences and emotions. This realist effect is both rich in ethical potential for addressing climate crisis and deepens this crisis’s anthropogenic arrogance. In considering a new form of realism that would avoid this dilemma, the chapter deploys Gerard Genette’s structuralist theories of transtextuality, arguing for the relevance of these ostensibly external, but deeply integrated, aspects of narrative in extending realism’s ethical effects while building a collective consciousness. Using this as a framework, it then discusses two authors whose work, textually and transtextually speaking, responds in some way to climate crisis: Kim Stanley Robinson and Liu Cixin.

The introduction sets out the rationale for the volume and its three sections. The first section, ‘Origins’, explores some of the fundamental questions arising out of the discursive condition of the concept of climate. The second, ‘Evolution’, pivots on the eighteenth century as a key moment in climate history - the formal codification and longitudinal observation of weather as the basis for an understanding of climate. The final section, ‘Application’, looks at climate’s status in the literature of the Anthropocene, exploring, in particular, how contemporary concerns around climate and climate change interact with established literary norms, particular those around temporal setting and duration.