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Accepted Paper:
Hybrids in literature and literary hybrids: writing ‘nature’ in the anthropocene
Veronika Groke
(independent researcher)
This paper reflects on the question of how ‘Nature’ can be meaningfully depicted as an engagement between the human and the nonhuman in works of anthropocene fiction by looking at the proliferation of mythology- and folklore-derived monsters and hybrids in recent literary works.
Paper long abstract:
Depictions of ‘nature’ in fiction have always reflected the broader socio-political context of their production. What most of these narratives in Western literature from the Enlightenment onwards have in common is how nature has been depicted as something external to, and separate from, the realm of the human. However, within the past few decades it has become more and more obvious that such a separation is no longer tenable. In 2000, the term ‘anthropocene’ was suggested by two scientists as replacement for ‘holocene’ to denote the current geological era in acknowledgment of the ‘major and still growing impacts of human activities on earth and atmosphere, and at all, including global, scales’ (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000: 17). Although the term remains contentious, it helped alert a wider public to the pervasiveness of the traces of human activity in the environment. So what, then, does this mean for fiction writers? How can we write ‘Nature’ in the anthropocence? This paper proposes one possible answer to this question by examining the proliferation of monsters and, in particular, hybrids in recent English-language literary works, many of which relate back to characters from myth and folklore.