Next article FreeBook ReviewVulnerable Earth: The Literature of Climate Crisis. Pramod K. Nayar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024. Pp. xiii+295.Diana Rose NewbyDiana Rose NewbyPrinceton University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookXLinkedInRedditBlueskyEmailPrint SectionsMore Literatures of the global climate crisis make up an ever-growing body of work, one attended by a similarly prolific corpus of scholarship in ecocriticism and the environmental humanities. Pramod K. Nayar's Vulnerable Earth: The Literature of Climate Crisis ventures into this crowded terrain with a bold effort at panorama, proposing to survey contemporary climate novels, memoirs, graphic novels, and community biographies from around the world (with a slight, stated preference for literary production in the Global South). Affirming literature's cultural importance as both a reflection and a construction of how humans perceive and interact with the natural world, Nayar draws out key potentialities of the literary imagination to shape "the public response to and tackling of climate crisis" (18): a familiar critical refrain, though one that Nayar lends new substance through his book's distinctly planetary scope. By far the most impressive features of Vulnerable Earth are the breadth and diversity of its archive, which features over one hundred primary texts from authors representing the literatures of six continents. Nayar's interpretive approach to his source materials privileges topical continuities over regional specificities, enabling Nayar and his readers to "think through echoes, resonances and anxieties that align and animate markedly different literatures" (16). In each of the book's four chapters, Nayar indexes the variety of literary works contributing to a given thematic cluster—hydropoetics, extinction, multispecies relations, and ecojustice, respectively. Sometimes we pause for close examination of a specific narrative, but more often we leapfrog from text to text: within two pages of "Hydropoetics," for example, Nayar collages representations of water crisis in Namwali Serpell's The Old Drift, Paolo Bacigalupi's The Water Knife, Cynan Jones's Stillicide, and Helon Habila's Oil on Water. Nayar acknowledges the potential pitfalls of the book's "universalizing" treatment of a phenomenon with differential impacts (15); I would add that his inattention to geographic and historical context further and more basically runs the risk of readerly disorientation. Then again, the ways in which Vulnerable Earth unmoors us from the particulars of place and time reinforce Nayar's investment in stories that resist anthropocentric structures such as the nation and that reorient readers to ecological interconnection at massive spatiotemporal scales. In its extensive documentation of climate fiction's thematics as well as its many subgenres, Vulnerable Earth reads as a catalog, almost a reference text rather than a monograph—an effect enhanced by Nayar's penchant for frequent and lengthy quotations from his primary texts. Put another way, the book is more descriptive than argumentative, marked by a tendency to present pools of evidence demonstrating representational trends without significant effort to read against the grain of either the literary texts or extant critical and theoretical discourses. There are localized instances of exception, particularly at the end of each chapter, where Nayar performs sustained and dynamic close readings of one or two works: "Extinction," for instance, concludes with an engrossing analysis of the "genetic determinism and biological essentialism" underwriting Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park (115). As a whole, however, Vulnerable Earth does not directly intervene in ecocritical debates; the introduction's invitation for us to think of vulnerability as a more-than-human state reinscribes a line of thinking common to much of ecocriticism. Yet I don't take intervention to be Nayar's aim in a project so committed to synthesis and interconnection. Instead, the book's primary source of original interpretive activity obtains in the curation of the archive itself as well as the classification of this archive through a multitude of neologisms, including but not limited to "hydronovel," Nayar's term for fiction depicting "both flood and drought conditions" (24); "eulogy narrative," a reframing of the extinction narrative with emphases on plenitude, enumeration, and multitemporality (69); and "creaturely texts," or stories "in which the human-nonhuman boundary is breached in significant and mutually constitutive ways" (125). Through these and related acts of naming, Nayar contributes to recent and ongoing efforts to more carefully attend to the work that language performs in ecocriticism: efforts that include Duke University Press's Living Lexicon for the Environmental Humanities as well as the forthcoming edited collection Lexicon for Animacy. Scholars of climate fiction will appreciate the generosity with which Nayar leaves myriad openings for more focused inquiry into the literary praxes and intertextual congruities that the book's neologisms make newly legible. As for readers new to the literatures of climate crisis, Vulnerable Earth is a valuable roadmap, one that seems especially well positioned for use in educational contexts where the environmental humanities are taught. Next article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Ahead of Print Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/737710 PermissionsRequest permissions Views: 6Total views on this site HistoryPublished online August 15, 2025 For permission to reuse, please contact email protected.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.
Diana Rose Newby (Fri,) studied this question.