Vittonatto, Silvia; (2025) Writing Ecological Grief: A Comparative Perspective on Elegiac Modes in Contemporary Literature. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

Text Silvia Vittonatto_ PhD Thesis_Final.pdf - Accepted Version Access restricted to UCL open access staff until 1 December 2026. Download (1MB)

Abstract

This thesis examines how ecological grief, as a central affective experience in the climate crisis and cultural response to it, is registered through elegiac modes in contemporary literature in English, French, and Italian. As a transitional and transformational state, I consider ecological grief a vector of formal innovation, and I demonstrate how the elegiac is an important mode in the literary engagement with the crisis across different forms and linguistic spheres. My focus on the imaginative affordances of elegiac writing also contributes to expanding our notion of elegy as a flexible mode beyond traditional generic boundaries. Chapter I provides a critical discussion of the concept of ecological grief in light of existing theories of grief and considers its limits and challenges, as well as its potential. Chapter II discusses elegiac modes as a means to articulate and process ecological grief. Chapter III examines the expression of ecological grief through the vegetal imagination in Andrea Cassini’s Non Tutto il Male. Cronache della terra inabitabile, and Michael Christie’s Greenwood, which combine speculative, futuristic elements with an elegiac commitment to the past. Chapter IV presents what I term “literary nesting”, a response to environmental instability and grief rooted in domestic retreatism, through the reading of Celine Minard’s Le Grand Jeu, Jessie Greengrass’s The High House, and Gabrielle Filteau-Chiba’s Encabanée. Chapter V analyses the climate-change memoir, using Roberto Casati’s La lezione del freddo and Daniel Sherrell’s Warmth. Coming of Age at the End of Our World as examples of this emerging generic formation negotiating autobiography and proleptic mourning to grapple with ecological and existential loss. Finally, in the Conclusions, I draw on the findings from the previous chapters to reflect on the complexity and potentiality of the elegiac engagement with ecological grief.

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