Heirs of Climate Change

How can literature initiate new ways of thinking and change the reader’s perception and attitude towards climate change? The novels The End We Start From by Megan Hunter, The Road by Cormac McCarthy and The Ice People by Maggie Gee provide a possible answer: through the portrayal of childhood and the figure of the child. The child, a symbol of the future and of intergenerational responsibility, is especially vulnerable in a world of disaster, destruction and ruin. The precarity of its situation manifests itself in the lack of a functioning family and in the collapse of society, civilisation and human relationships. This environment that the children are surrounded by and must survive in permits authors of climate fiction to gap a psychological distance, address questions of intergenerational equality, evoke feelings of responsibility and finally to raise an awareness of the urgency of the issue.

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