A Fictional Risk Narrative and Its Potential for Social Resonance: Reception of Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior in Reviews and Reading Groups

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Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior is one of the most prominent examples in the “currently emerging genre of the climate change novel” (Mayer 2014, 24; see also Trexler and Johns-Putra 2011). Published in 2012, it offers a complex comment on contemporary US-American risk discourses about climate change. Science, as represented in the novel, figures as a detector of ecological risks. At the same time, scientists are shown to lack the capacity for effectively communicating this knowledge to the general public. By representing science and scientists in this way, the novel may itself be read as taking on the task of informing...
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationUnder the Literary Microscope : Science and Society in the Contemporary Novel
EditorsSina Farzin, Susan Gaines, Ros Haynes
Number of pages31
Place of PublicationUniversity Park
PublisherPennsylvania State University Press
Publication date2021
Pages218-248
Article number10
ISBN (print)978-0-271-08978-2
ISBN (electronic)978-0-271-09011-5
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2021

DOI