Climate Change “Comes Knocking”. An Ecocritical Analysis of the Anthology Empty House

Abstract

Empty House (Doire Press 2021) is a poetry and prose anthology, edited by Alice Kinsella and Nessa O’Mahony, in which writers from the English-speaking world, although mainly Ireland, elaborate on climate crisis topics such as natural disasters, biodiversity and eco-anxiety. This dissertation aims to the study the connections between the human and the nonhuman, now affected by climate change, that these texts establish. Empty House presents a local endangered environment that triggers feelings of fear, hopelessness and indignation, but also admiration for nature and an explicit demand for its global conservation and the implementation of urgent socioeconomic changes. The various perspectives and literary genres the authors have adopted to introduce ecocritical topics will also be analysed according to current environmental literary criticism. Fundamental books such Hubert Zapf’s Literature as Cultural Ecology (2016), Matthew Griffiths’ The New Poetics of Climate Change (2017) and Andrew J. Auge and Eugene O’Brien’s Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Climate Crisis (2022) will be used for this purpose. Contemporary contributions to ecocriticism, notably Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence (2011), Astrida Neimanis’ Bodies of Water (2017) and Kyle Bladow and Jennifer Ladino’s Affective Ecocriticism (2018) will further the theoretical discussion of the topics introduced in Empty House