Contextualizing climate change fiction and anthropocene criticism in the 21st century: an interview with Adeline Johns-Putra

Adeline Johns-Putra is Professor of English Literature at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University and Fel-low of the Royal Society of Arts. She is one of the first ecocritics to focus on climate change fiction (cli-fi) and has published widely in this field. This interview consists of two parts, addressing the narrative strategies of cli-fis and the genealogy of various interdisciplinary methodologies in cli-fi studies. Johns-Putra points out the importance of historicizing and contextualizing cli-fis and Anthropocene criticism in the 21st century. She emphasizes an inter-generational and cross-species perspective to incorporate both the human and the non-human, both the Global North and the Global South, in a "Critical Eudaemonistic Framework." Also, she suggests the necessity of putting Chinese environmental literature and Western texts in a comparative atlas. However, she insists that the hermeneutic interpretation of literary texts should be valued in any interdisciplinary or comparative cli-fi studies.