AustLit

'Ben Holgate’s Climate and Crises: Magical Realism as Environmental Discourse (2019) makes an important contribution to scholarship on the interplay between culture and society, with a distinct focus on the representation of the effects of human occupation of the natural world. It is a work of outstanding scholarship, meticulously researched and attentive to each novel’s distinct cultural, political and aesthetic frameworks. Although he disputes its central premise, Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016) both impels and haunts Holgate’s thinking. Ghosh lamented novelists’ failure to recognise and address the impact of climate change. In words quoted in Holgate, he wrote: ‘the climate crisis is also a crisis of culture and a crisis of imagination.’ Where Holgate’s thinking differs is in his view that while this may the case with ‘the conventional realist structure of the British, European or American novel’ (6), ‘magical realist fiction and environmental literature have a long tradition of overlapping’ (1). This study is concerned with examining that overlap in a series of close readings of selected works by authors from Australia, New Zealand, India, China and Taiwan. It examines ‘not only how magical realism is a natural ally of environmental literature but also why magical realism is a dynamic, constantly evolving narrative mode that can address the challenges of imagination posed by the crisis of climate change’ (8–9).' (Introduction)