Irish Anthropocene : Literature, Climate Change, Sovereignty

In Irish Anthropocene, Malcolm Sen traces the ways in which contemporary Irish literature is deeply engaged with climate change issues. Drawing upon concepts of sovereignty, precarity, and disaster, Sen examines Irish literary works and their concern with realms of the political, the economic, and the ecological. The association of greenness with Ireland and its role in the corporatization of Ireland Inc. has been robustly critiqued to reveal the underbelly of Ireland’s unsustainable energy and food regimes and its distressing environmental record with international climate change mitigation efforts.

Writing in the shadow of such emissions, contemporary authors are alert not only to the insincerity of pastoralist rhetoric and the instrumentalized greenery of Irish fiction, but they are also responding to the planetary-level threats dominating the discourse of the Anthropocene. The Irish canon has historically played a crucial role in Irish nationalism, and these works are often written at a time when questions of statehood and citizenship are increasingly at the forefront of Irish and geopolitical discourses.

Sen argues that Ireland’s fraught nationhood—and its resulting literature—can be used as a framework to analyze the ubiquitous, multigenerational scale of the climate crisis. Cleverly written and groundbreaking in scope, Sen’s analyses dissect the connection between Irish sovereignty, its literature, and the urgent climate disaster.