Abstract This article explores narratives of resilience and human survival amidst polycrisis in contemporary British climate fiction. Arguing for the need of a stronger integration of resilience studies and ecocritical narratology, it draws on three case studies, Bethany Clift’s Last One at the Party (2021), Oana Aristide’s Under the Blue (2021), and Claire Fuller’s The Memory of Animals (2023), published during the height and in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, a time which brought the interrelations between environmental, health, and other crises into sharp focus. The novels depict post-apocalyptic scenarios in which a pandemic has wiped out most of the human population and in which the isolated protagonists struggle to survive. The characters’ resilience is engendered through strategies such as list-making, domestic routines, and caring for others. Indicative of ‘climate imaginaries’ (Hulme 2021) shaped by cultural settings and epistemologies of the Global North, the narratives shift the concern with resilience from risk and declensionist disaster narratives towards questions of survival of a select few and individual development. The narratives imagine futurity by refashioning Western realist modes of narration, retrieving conventional narrative tropes of hope for the future, such as pregnancy and the birth of a child. They do not strive for the depiction of collective visions of hope or societal transformation, but are characterized by employing what reemerges as a resilient narrative form, the realist novel, and the template of the Robinsonade, focussed on individual psychological resilience and survival against the odds.
Julia Hoydis (Thu,) studied this question.