Date of Award

December 2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

English

First Advisor

Crystal Alberts

Abstract

Environmental storytelling has increasingly reckoned with concepts and assumptions about (N/a)ture inherited from the Western intellectual tradition. The late 2010s and early 2020s in particular have seen an explosion of fiction that interrogates the limits of these past ideas. Relatedly, ecocriticism of this period has entered a self-reflexive mode that has sought to deal with its own limitations while offering insights that may prove generative for a more general audience of environmentally minded readers. This project adds to ongoing ecocritical discourse by tracing a series of implicit affinities between the broad traditions of anthropology and environmental fiction through their shared interest in radical, frequently optimistic, politics. These affinities form the basis for what I term an “anthropological literary criticism” that takes lessons from real-world scenarios and juxtaposes them with fictional works that grapple with similar questions. Through close readings of Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, Richard Powers’s Bewilderment, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140, I propose three tenets of this literary criticism as applied to environmental novels. First, this criticism operates under the belief that the social systems of a given time and place are not the product of an inevitable, linear evolution toward industrial state capitalism. Second, such a lens offers a detailed deconstruction of how these now destabilized ideas have operated in fictional worlds while gesturing toward new understandings on the cusp of emergence. And third, by holding as its unifying principle a belief in the malleability of individual persons and their composite communities, an "anthropological ecocriticism" refuses narratives of doom while looking toward the future with a kind of empowering hope.

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