Queer and Environmental Melancholia in American Coming-of-age Fiction: Narratives of Loss and Resistance in the Anthropocene

This project considers the renewed significance of coming-of-age literature in the Anthropocene. What happens to depictions of youthful rebellion and human growth when the environment has become a space of irretrievable expenditure and loss? And how might grief help us imagine alternatives to narratives of progress and adulthood? Drawing together strands of queer theory and the environmental humanities that focus on the melancholic refusal to accept ecological degradation, this project offers an important literary context for contemporary eco-protest. It reconceptualises American coming-of-age fiction, addressing it to problems of political resistance and adolescent mental health.