The Novel's Changing Climate: Richard Powers's The Overstory as an Anthropocene Novel

Abstract: This essay reads The Overstory as an important attempt at representing other-than-humans in literature and contextualizes this as a way of grappling with the ongoing climate crisis and the loss of a horizon for collective futures under neoliberal capitalism in the Anthropocene. By reading two passages from The Overstory the essay attempts to explore the novel as a story of realism's success in representing other-than-humans as distinct characters and the fluctuating, massive timescales of other beings. It argues that by constructing other-than-human characters, both in their individuality and in their multi-species plurality, the realist novel might do justice to some of the temporal and spatial problems posed by the Anthropocene. This shift from the traditional realist mode to a multispecies narrative offers a way for novels to represent life in the Anthropocene in a manner that works against the dominate extractive logics that contribute to the climate crisis.