“Time Has Caught on Fire:” Eco-Anxiety and Anger in Selected Australian Poetry

• Published in: International Studies. Interdisciplinary Political and Cultural Journal
• Main Author: Kowalcze-Pawlik, Anna
• Other Authors: University of Lodz, Faculty of International and Political Studies, Department of British and Commonwealth Studies, [e-mail]
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego 2022
• Subjects: emotions in Australian literature; solastalgia; metaphors of anger; Anthropocene; Australian wildfires; trauma; First Nations
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/11089/41686; https://doi.org/10.18778/1641-4233.26.08

This essay discusses fire as a significant factor shaping Australian social and cultural life. It focuses first on the climate-change induced emotions such as eco-anxiety and anger that can be tied with the Australian landscape, and then moves on to a discussion of the presence and function of fire in selected contemporary Australian poetry. The reflection on the poetics of trauma in the second part of the essay is accompanied by a discussion of solastalgia connected with land dispossession as an experience of the First Nations expressed in the Aboriginal literature in English.