Fictions of Climate at the Fin de Siècle

Overall, the thesis contributes to two main fields: Fin-de-Siècle Studies and “climate and literature” (cli-fi). It contributes to the understanding of the fin de siècle by highlighting how scientists, urban planners, architects, engineers, and artists imagined and constructed smaller or larger spheres of climate control, which several speculative writers extrapolate into a modern, utopian, or dystopian world characterized by planetary climate control. The thesis thus extends the notion of the fin de siècle as a transitional period in the history of anthropogenic climate. The thesis also contributes to the general study of “climate and literature” and the more specific study of cli-fi, firstly by illuminating how literature has imagined the deliberate alteration, control, or construction of the planetary atmosphere, and secondly by showing how some of the narrative features that characterize speculative fiction after 1870 – large-scale speculative modeling of the influence of human technology on planetary processes – act as a precursor to modern cli-fi. By examining the notion and construction of climate control, Fictions of Climate at the Fin de Siècle presents a reinterpretation of the still speculative technology of geoengineering (large-scale intervention in the climate system to counteract global warming) as not just a material, scientific, or technological phenomenon of the future, but as an aesthetic, affective, ideological, and social phenomenon of the past, revealing the grandeur and hubris of our transitional present.