Seeking Greener Pages: An Analysis of Reader Response to Australian Eco-Crime Fiction

N THEIR WORK ON HOW NARRATIVE MAY HELP AUDIENCES THINK DIFFERENTLY ABOUT other species, Wojciech Malecki et al. refer to the ‘narrative turn’ within academia and its proliferation of research that addresses how ‘moral intuitions often yield to narrative persuasion’ (2). In other words, many scholars are currently asking whether narratives can persuade readers to reflect on and perhaps reconsider their own moral beliefs. The research presented in this paper follows a similar trajectory in its discussion of the results and possible implications of a reader response study that investigated how Australian readers respond to works of Australian eco-crime fiction that portray non-humans and global ecological issues such as climate change in a local Australian context. Resonant with ‘narrative persuasion’— the idea amongst social scientists that ‘a narrative is a catalyst for perspective change’ (Hamby et al. 114)— we consider the capacity of such texts to possibly engage readers with the plight of non-humans in Australia under the impacts of climate change. This study employed reader response methodology to determine some of the key themes that Australian readers are drawn to when reading Australian eco-crime fiction, with particular emphasis placed on understanding their responses to representations of the non-human and associated environmental issues in these texts. While this study originally focused on literary as well as genre ecofiction, this paper focuses in a more targeted way on the reader responses to Australian