From Elegy to Climate Bildungsroman: Jenni Fagan's The Sunlight Pilgrims

Abstract Climate-change discourse is suffused with a profound sense of loss, amid accelerating ecological degradation. While some ecocritics consider the elegy an apt means of narrativizing these losses, others call for genres capable of moving beyond mourning. I argue that the Bildungsroman—which typically depicts a protagonist who undergoes a transformational journey following crisis and eventually comes to terms with the world—may narrativize the process of moving beyond climate grief and adapting to a changed world. I indicate a corpus of novels that may be termed “climate Bildungsromane,” which envision various transformations following climate grief. Through an analysis of one significant example, Jenni Fagan's The Sunlight Pilgrims , I explore climate Bildungsromane's tendency to narrate the journey from ecocatastrophe to adaptation through a fusion of modern scientific rationality with forms of belief and storytelling commonly considered premodern. I contemplate how and why this seeming paradox surfaces across cultural imaginings of journeys beyond climate grief.