Alice Bell

Traversing science, politics, and technology, Our Biggest Experiment shines a spotlight on the little-known scientists who sounded the alarm to reveal the history behind the defining story of our age: the climate crisis. In 1856, American scientist and women's rights activist Eunice Newton Foote first warned the world that an atmosphere heavy with carbon dioxide could send temperatures here on Earth soaring. No one paid much attention. Our Biggest Experiment tells Foote's story, along with stories of the many scientists who helped build our modern understanding of climate change. It also tells the story of our energy system, from whale oil to kerosene and beyond, the first steamships, wind turbines, electric cars, oil tankers, and fridges. The story flows from the Enlightenment into World War II and later, tracing the development of big science and our advancing realization that global warming was a significant global problem. With precision and wit, Bell chronicles the growth of the environmental movement, climate skepticism, and political systems such as the UN climate talks. As citizens of the twenty-first century, it can feel like history has dealt us a bad hand with the climate crisis. In many ways, this is true. Our ancestors have left us an almighty mess. But they left us tools for survival too, and Our Biggest Experiment tells both sides of the story.

An Epic History of the Climate Crisis

Our Biggest Experiment

How to Use Astrology to Navigate Your Love Life and Find Your Authentic Self

Trust Your Timing

A fast-paced and hilarious debut crime novel, in which a burnt-out Millennial medium must utilize her ability to see ghosts and team-up with a band of oddball investigators to figure out which member(s) of a posh English family are guilty of murder. “This book has bags of humor, bags of heart, and a proper murder mystery at its core.” —Janice Hallett, author of The Appeal Almost-authentic medium Claire and her best friend, Sophie, agree to take on a seemingly simple job at a crumbling old manor in the English countryside: performing a seance for the family matriarch's 80th birthday. The pair have been friends since before Sophie went missing when they were seventeen. Everyone else is convinced Sophie simply ran away, but Claire knows the truth. Claire knows Sophie was murdered because Sophie has been haunting her ever since. Despite this traumatic past, Claire and Sophie are still unprepared for what they encounter when they arrive at the manor: a ghost, tragic and unrecognizable, and clearly the spirit of someone killed in a rage at the previous year's party. Given her obsession with crime shows—not to mention Sophie's ability to walk through walls—Claire decides they're the best people to solve the case. And with the help of the only obviously not-guilty members of their host family—sexy ex-policeman Sebastian and far-too-cool non-binary teen Alex—they launch an investigation into which of last year's guests never escaped the manor's grounds. What follows is somewhat irregular detective work involving stealing a priest's cassock, getting too drunk to remember to question your suspect, and of course, Chekhov's sparkly purple dildo. As Claire desperately tries to keep a lid on the shameful secret that would definitely alienate her new friends, the gang must race against their own incompetence to find the murderer before the murderer finds them.

A Mystery

Grave Expectations

Janice Hallett meets Ben Aaronovitch in this debut crime series that will have you laughing loudly enough to raise the dead.

Displeasure Island

This new volume in The Big Idea series surveys the detrimental impact humans have had on the planet and evaluates what we can do to reverse the damage.

A Primer for the 21st Century

Can We Save the Planet?

Marie-Laure Ryan

The notion of possible worlds has played a decisive role in postclassical narratology by awakening interest in the nature of fictionality and in emphasizing the notion of world as a source of aesthetic experience in narrative texts. As a theory concerned with the opposition between the actual world that we belong to and possible worlds created by the imagination, possible worlds theory has made significant contributions to narratology. Possible Worlds Theory and Contemporary Narratology updates the field of possible worlds theory and postclassical narratology by developing this theoretical framework further and applying it to a range of contemporary literary narratives. This volume systematically outlines the theoretical underpinnings of the possible worlds approach, provides updated methods for analyzing fictional narrative, and profiles those methods via the analysis of a range of different texts, including contemporary fiction, digital fiction, video games, graphic novels, historical narratives, and dramatic texts. Through the variety of its contributions, including those by three originators of the subject area—Lubomír Doležel, Thomas Pavel, and Marie-Laure Ryan—Possible Worlds Theory and Contemporary Narratology demonstrates the vitality and versatility of one of the most vibrant strands of contemporary narrative theory.

Possible Worlds Theory and Contemporary Narratology

Did you know the link between carbon dioxide and global warming was first suggested in the 1850s? Climate change books are usually about the future, but Our Biggest Experiment turns instead asks how did we get into this mess, and how and when did we work out it was happening? Join Alice Bell on a rip-roaring ride through the characters, ideas, technologies and experiments that shaped the climate crisis we now find ourselves in.From an emerging idea of 'greenhouse gases' in the 19th century and, via scientific expeditions across oceans and ice caps and into space, the coining of the term 'global warming' in the 1970s, Bell explores how we began to realise that not only could human pollution dangerously warm the climate, but that it was already doing so. Drop by the first climate talks, weather forecasts and early experiments. Watch excitement over solar and wind power start in the 1870s, only to be forgotten before being rediscovered a century later. See the monster of big oil slain by a plucky investigative journalist back in the 1910s, only tore-emerge more powerful than ever. However, this isn't a simple story with exploitative fossil-fuel baddies on one side and the goodies of renewable energy, environmentalism and climate science on the other. It's more complex than that.As citizens of the 21st century, we've been left an almighty mess, but as this ultimately hopeful book argues, we've also inherited the tools for our survival.

A History of the Climate Crisis

Our Biggest Experiment - SHORTLISTED for the WAINWRIGHT PRIZE for CONSERVATION WRITING 2022

Possiamo salvare il pianeta?

Astrid Ensslin

Refines, critiques, and expands unnatural, cognitive, and transmedial narratology by looking at digital-born fictions.

Transmedial Narrative Theory, Method, and Analysis

Digital Fiction and the Unnatural

Alison Gibbons

David Peplow

Sam Browse

Style and Reader Response: Minds, media, methods profiles the diversity of theoretical and methodological approaches in reception-oriented research in stylistics. Collectively, the chapters investigate how real readers, players, audiences, and viewers respond to, experience, and interpret texts. Contributions to the book investigate discourse types such as contemporary literature, poetry, political speeches, digital fiction, art exhibitions, and online news discourse. The volume also exemplifies the variety of empirical approaches in reception research, with contributors drawing on a range of methods including discussion groups, interviews, questionnaires, and think-aloud protocols with data analysed from both online and offline sources. Style and Reader Response makes an important contribution to an emerging paradigm within stylistics in which verifiable insights from readers are used to generate new models and new understandings of texts across media, with each essay demonstrating the centrality of empirical research for theoretical, methodological, and/or analytical advancements within and beyond stylistics.

Minds, media, methods

Style and Reader Response

The effects of global warming are being felt around the world through climate change, and images of our rivers and oceans choking with plastic have provoked an instinctive horrified reaction. In response, governments, corporations and individuals are beginning to change their policies and behaviour but is it too little, too late? Is it possible to reverse the damage we have done to the planet, or have we reached the point where we are only able to manage the problems and devastation caused? This engaging and incisive volume offers insightful analysis of a range of key issues including deforestation, global warming and single use plastics, while evaluating whether and how it may just be possible to mend our planet.

A primer for the 21st century

Can We Save The Planet?

Hans Rustad

Written for and read on a computer screen, digital fiction pursues its verbal, discursive and conceptual complexity through the digital medium. It is fiction whose structure, form and meaning are dictated by the digital context in which it is produced and requires analytical approaches that are sensitive to its status as a digital artifact. Analyzing Digital Fiction offers a collection of pioneering analyses based on replicable methodological frameworks. Chapters include analyses of hypertext fiction, Flash fiction, Twitter fiction and videogames with approaches taken from narratology, stylistics, semiotics and ludology. Essays propose ways in which digital environments can expand, challenge and test the limits of literary theories which have, until recently, predominantly been based on models and analyses of print texts.

Analyzing Digital Fiction

Jan Alber

This book explores the complex interrelationship between fact and fiction in narratives of the twenty-first century. Current cultural theory observes a cultural shift away from postmodernism to new forms of expression. Rather than a radical break from the postmodern, however, postmodernist techniques are repurposed to express a new sincerity, a purposeful self-reflexivity, a contemporary sense of togetherness and an associated commitment to reality. In what the editors consider to be one manifestation of this general tendency, this book explores the ways in which contemporary texts across different media play with the boundary between fact and fiction. This includes the examination of novels, autobiography, autofiction, film, television, mockumentary, digital fiction, advertising campaigns and media hoaxes. The chapters engage with theories of what comes after postmodernism and analyse the narratological, stylistic and/or semiotic devices on which such texts rely. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the European Journal of English Studies.

Alice Bell

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