From Religious Nostalgia to Eco-Postsecularism: Scriptures for Climate-Changed Futures in Fictions by Richard Jefferies, Will Self, and Octavia Butler
This paper offers an eco-postsecular reading of Octavia Butler’s two-part Parable series (1993-1998) and Will Self’s Book of Dave (2006), alongside a Victorian predecessor of contemporary climate fiction: Richard Jefferies’s After London; or, Wild England (1885). The futuristic visions of Jefferies, Self, and Butler illustrate the exceptional explanatory and affective power of sacred texts, and reflect on the benefits and hazards of reading, re-reading, and un-reading religious scriptures under conditions of climate pressure.