The Year Without Summer: Exploring the Environmental Uncanny in Neo-Georgian Climate Fiction

The late-twentieth-century debate on the ‘death of the novel’, as reflected in the writings of John Barth and Alain Robbe-Grillet, foreshadowed recent critiques regarding the genre’s ability to address contemporary issues like climate change. Despite this, some scholars argue that the twenty-first-century novel remains well suited to engage with present complexities, particularly within the realm of cli-fi. Among its sub-genres, the historical climate change novel stands out for its capacity to estrange us from the present, thereby denaturalizing social reality and constructing a relational historical account of the climate crisis that intertwines multiple spatial and temporal dimensions, even beyond the human. While several historical cli-fi works blend realism with the fabulous and the surreal, Guinevere Glasfurd’s neo-Georgian climate fiction novel The Year Without Summer (TYWS) (2020) aligns more closely with the tradition of historical realism. This alignment is significant, as it anchors the novel's reimagining of history while integrating the non- human into historical discourse. In this paper, I aim to investigate the potential of TYWS in depicting what Amitav Ghosh terms the ‘environmental uncanny’, namely the encounter with the unpredictability of the non-human. The six stories that comprise Glasfurd’s novel, set in Indonesia, England, and the United States during the eruption of Mount Tambora and the subsequent summer of 1816, feature characters—both historical and fictional— who, despite spatial and temporal distances, are interconnected by a catastrophic non-human event. I will suggest that this non-human force not only plays a crucial thematic role but also serves as a cohesive element in the novel's fragmented narrative structure, thereby demonstrating the potential of historical realism to articulate an ontologically plural history.