To Delight and Misinstruct
Strategic Environmental Narratives in New Yorker Fiction
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21192569 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Matthew Schneider-Mayerson (0000-0002-7848-0759, Rice University, corresponding author), Christopher A Walker (Colby College), Verónica Romero (0000-0002-1721-5732, Colby College), Kiara McCellon (Colby College), Claire Campbell (0000-0001-9337-6514, Colby College), Moya Stringer (Colby College), Charlotte Snow (Colby College), Samantha Chilton (Colby College) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Pages | 1-21 |
| Publication date | 2026-07-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Environmental Communication (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1752-4032 • E-ISSN: 1752-4040 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/17524032.2026.2693883 |
| OpenAlex | W7166877241 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 39 |
How has contemporary literature responded to, helped mitigate, or exacerbated the climate and nature crises? To begin answering this question systematically, we developed the Strategic Environmental Narratives codebook and applied it to 474 short stories published between 2014 and 2023 in The New Yorker, the most prestigious Anglophone literary magazine. We find that climate change exists in just 10.1% of these stories and freshwater pollution, marine pollution, air pollution, deforestation, species extinction / biodiversity loss, or toxic waste exists in 15.6%. When present, these environmental problems are mostly marginalized and minimized; structural culprits – governments, corporations, and the wealthy – are rarely assigned responsibility; and pro-environmental actions and behaviors are rarely modeled. Synthesizing these results with recent data on popular films suggests an unspoken “cultural climate consensus” across contemporary media on how often climate change can or should be included in fictional narratives. Through a typology of “strategic environmental narratives” – including “eco-lite narratives”, “normalizing narratives”, and “symptomatic climate fiction” – we discuss how fiction can pursue its time-honored goal of both delighting and instructing readers in an era of planetary polycrisis
Climate change · Environmental movement · Extinction (optical mineralogy) · Narrative · Typology · Climate Change Communication and Perception · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Media Influence and Health
Distant Horizons
The Program Era
Affective Ecologies
Agenda-Setting Theory
Narrative Identity
Orality and Literacy
High-income groups disproportionately contribute to climate extremes worldwide
Environmental Literature as Persuasion
Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction 2025
Creative (Climate) Communications
The Social Amplification of Risk
Entertainment-Education and Social Change
The full story
Time to Blow Up the Factory? A Q Method Reception Study of Literary Environmental Activism in Malte Tellerup’s Spræng Fabrikken (2023)
The Great Derangement
The Presence and Portrayal of Climate Change and Other Environmental Problems in Popular Films
The climate mitigation gap
Toward a Theory of Entertainment Persuasion
Examining evidence for the Finite Pool of Worry and Finite Pool of Attention hypotheses
Skepticism About Media Effects Concerning the Environment
Literature as Cultural Ecology
Uses and Gratifications Research
Individualization
The Science of Climate Conversations
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |