Allegory and Articulation in Geographies of Climate Fiction

The contemporary genre of climate fiction can be thought of as the stories we tell ourselves about our changing global climate. Thus, it is important to understand the dynamics behind the production and circulation of those stories. This article first reviews how geographers have begun to analyze these questions with regard to climate fiction. Some analyses reflect a certain “ideology critique,” similar to Fredric Jameson’s theories of allegory, while others foreground the agency of fiction in prefiguring political futures. This article also shows how recent suggestions that Gillian Hart’s theorization of articulation bridges the classic disciplinary divide between historical materialist and poststructuralist accounts, in addition to work in the subfield of literary geography, are relevant in this case. After discussing examples of “ideology critique” and what I term the “fiction-as-change-agent” critique, I examine how theorizing articulation can help show the dialectical relationship between ideology and fictive agency in the context of contemporary climate fiction. I do this in reference to two recent works of climate fiction: Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island (2019) and Lydia Millet’s A Children’s Bible (2020).