In Irish Anthropocene, Malcolm Sen traces the ways in which
contemporary Irish literature is deeply engaged with climate change
issues. Drawing upon concepts of sovereignty, precarity, and disaster,
Sen examines Irish literary works and their concern with realms of the
political, the economic, and the ecological. The association of
greenness with Ireland and its role in the corporatization of Ireland
Inc. has been robustly critiqued to reveal the underbelly of Ireland’s
unsustainable energy and food regimes and its distressing environmental
record with international climate change mitigation efforts.

Writing in the shadow of such emissions, contemporary authors are
alert not only to the insincerity of pastoralist rhetoric and the
instrumentalized greenery of Irish fiction, but they are also responding
to the planetary-level threats dominating the discourse of the
Anthropocene. The Irish canon has historically played a crucial role in
Irish nationalism, and these works are often written at a time when
questions of statehood and citizenship are increasingly at the forefront
of Irish and geopolitical discourses.

Sen argues that Ireland’s fraught nationhood—and its resulting
literature—can be used as a framework to analyze the ubiquitous,
multigenerational scale of the climate crisis. Cleverly written and
groundbreaking in scope, Sen’s analyses dissect the connection between
Irish sovereignty, its literature, and the urgent climate disaster.