Legal Drafts in Anthropocene Literature

As the climate crisis intensifies, contemporary literature has emerged as one of the most potent arenas for legal imagination.

Legal Drafts in Anthropocene Literature examines how fiction set in the Anthropocene — ranging from cli-fi novels to experimental poetry — anticipates, critiques and actively shapes the development of legal frameworks aimed at addressing environmental destruction.

Building on the key idea that literature acts as a ‘seismographic’ indicator of legal change, this volume brings together Alexandra Juster, Justine Scarlaken, Matthew Birkhold, and Amitabh Vikram Dwivedi, who analyse works by John Ironmonger, Gaspard Koenig, Jean Giono, Camille de Toledo, Baptiste Morizot, Jessie Kleemann, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Indra Sinha.

The authors reveal how fictional narratives generate what the volume terms 'legal drafts' — implicit or explicit proposals for new legal concepts, instruments, and responsibilities that are urgently needed in the Anthropocene era.

The volume addresses the most pressing legal questions of our time: How can individuals and collectives be held accountable for climate damage? Should nature be granted legal personality? What would an ‘ecocide’ prosecution entail, and how can narratives render such an unthinkable crime imaginable? How does poetry expose the epistemological limits of law when confronted with slow violence and planetary interdependence?

The contributions collectively demonstrate that literature does not merely reflect legal reality — it actively generates it, from river parliaments and beaver diplomacy in contemporary French literature to Greenlandic poetic testimony as a speculative lawsuit against ice melt and the narrative jurisprudence of climate governance fiction.