This book traces the development of “Ecosickness fiction” through an assessment of contemporary U.S. novels and memoirs. It describes how the 1970s brought about a new understanding of the biological and intellectual impacts that environmental crisis can have on human beings. It shows that at this time, as efforts to prevent ecological and bodily injury aligned, a new literature of sickness emerged. It explains that this “Ecosickness fiction” imaginatively rethinks the link between environmental threats and the sick body to bring readers to environmental consciousness. The book establishes the ... More

This book traces the development of “Ecosickness fiction” through an assessment of contemporary U.S. novels and memoirs. It describes how the 1970s brought about a new understanding of the biological and intellectual impacts that environmental crisis can have on human beings. It shows that at this time, as efforts to prevent ecological and bodily injury aligned, a new literature of sickness emerged. It explains that this “Ecosickness fiction” imaginatively rethinks the link between environmental threats and the sick body to bring readers to environmental consciousness. The book establishes the understanding that we cannot comprehend environmental and medical dilemmas through data alone. It argues that we must call on the, sometimes surprising, emotions that literary metaphors, tropes, and narratives deploy. In chapters on David Foster Wallace, Richard Powers, Leslie Marmon Silko, Marge Piercy, Jan Zita Grover, and David Wojnarowicz, the book shows how narrative affects such as wonder and disgust organize perception of an endangered world and orient us ethically toward it. The book builds connections between contemporary literature, ecocriticism, affect studies, and the medical humanities. It also positions ecosickness fiction relative to emergent forms of environmentalism and technoscientific innovations such as regenerative medicine and alternative ecosystems. It models an approach to contemporary fiction as a laboratory for affective changes that spark or squelch ethical projects.