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In this moment of climate precarity, Victorian studies scholar Barbara Leckie considers the climate crisis as a problem of time. Spanning the long nineteenth century through our current moment, her interdisciplinary treatment of climate change at once rethinks time and illustrates that the time for climate action is now.
Climate Change, Interrupted argues that linear, progress-inflected temporalities are not adequate to a crisis that defies their terms. Instead, this book advances a theory and practice of interruption to rethink prevailing temporal frameworks. At the same time, it models the anachronistic, time-blending, and time-layering temporality it advances. In a series of experimental chapters informed by the unlikely trio of Walter Benjamin, Donna Haraway, and Virginia Woolf, Leckie reinflects and cowrites the traditions and knowledges of the long nineteenth century and the current period in the spirit of climate action collaboration.
The current moment demands as many approaches as possible, invites us to take risks, and asks scholars and activists adept at storytelling to participate in the conversation. Climate Change, Interrupted, accordingly, invests in interruption to tell a different story of the climate crisis.
Barbara Leckie is Professor of English and the Comparative Study of Literature, Art, and Culture at Carleton University. She is the author of Open Houses: Poverty, the Novel, and the Architectural Idea in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2018), among other books, and coordinator for the Carleton Climate Commons.
"Climate Change, Interrupted is a moving and voracious experiment that inspires more than it alarms. I so appreciate the capacious and unexpected circles it draws, and Leckie's sage and spirited company on every page."
– Maggie Nelson, author of On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
"What a treat to read such brilliantly surprising readings of Benjamin, Eliot, and Shelley, braided together in an exquisitely crafted experimental work. Leckie makes a powerful case for the crucial role of the humanities in the climate crisis."
– Caroline Levine, author of Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network
"Highly original, boldly conceived, and extremely thought-provoking. The genuine honesty and directness of Leckie's voice, and the approachability of her experimentation, will ensure this book finds a wide audience."
– Kate Flint, author of Flash! Photography, Writing, and Surprising Illumination
"This is a dazzling piece of work, and a joy to read – deeply adventurous and undisciplined in the best sense of that term."
– Jesse Oak Taylor, coeditor of Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times
