In the Borderlands of the Anthropocene: Eco-Nationalism and Sarah Moss’s Climate Fictions

From the rain falling on the shores of a Loch in Summerwater (2020) to the Northumbrian past reenacted in Ghost Wall (2018), the fiction of contemporary British novelist Sarah Moss depicts how a humanity forced to reckon with its interdependence with nonhuman counterparts struggles to give up its anthropocentricism. Moss intertwines ancestral attachment to land with an impending sense of global ecological collapse in the wake of Britain’s exit from the European Union and exposes the intersection between nationalist ideologies and violent attitudes towards animals, plants, and local environments. By likening the scapegoating of vulnerable individuals to violent exploitation of natural resources, the novels intertwine imperial nostalgia with an anxiety around gender roles and humans’ place within a world bent on ecological disaster.