In the first part of the thesis, I investigate how fiction mediates and registers the structural drivers of biodiversity loss, which tend to be neglected in coverage of the extinction crisis. Drawing on materialist and multispecies theories, the study pursues two avenues of research: it examines species extinction as both, and simultaneously, a material reality and a cultural discourse.

Building on existing environmental humanities scholarship, the thesis demonstrates and tests literature’s capacity to complement or counter the spectacular, apocalyptic, and exclusionary modes through which species extinction is often portrayed in popular culture, and thereby to contribute to understanding and ameliorating our dire environmental predicament. This thesis explores how contemporary literature in English engages with what has come to be known as the sixth mass extinction, the ongoing extinction event as a result of human activity that is causing a devastating loss of biodiversity not seen since the dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago. The Southern Reach and the new weird welcome the monstrous as kin rather than enemy.

This paper argues that new weird stories such as VanderMeer's are able to rework and dispel the fearful paralysis of cosmic horror found in Lovecraft's literature and of Anthropocene monsters in ecocritical debate. It does this in a manner that brings into question human hierarchical coexistence with nonhumans while also exposing the ineffectiveness of current existential norms. Jeff VanderMeer's trilogy The Southern Reach (2014) presents an alien system of assimilation and ecological mutation into which the characters are launched. While monsters from the traditional, Lovecraftian weird lend themselves well to Anthropocene allegory due to the coinciding fear affect in both discourses, the new weird genre experiments with ways to move beyond cosmic fear, thereby reimagining the human position in the context of the Anthropocene. This paper investigates and compares language and imagery used by contemporary ecocritics in order to argue that the Anthropocene discourse contains significant parallels to cosmic horror discourse and (new) weird literature.

The southern reach trilogy