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Highlighting the topic of environmental protest and rebellion, as expressed in selected literature for children and young adults, this Reprint seeks to contribute to sustaining a focus on environmental and ecocritical thinking in the face of global crises. Comprising contributions from scholars in Ukraine, Finland, Norway, Italy, the UK, Sweden, Belgium, Germany, and Ireland, all sharing their unique analyses of literary eco-rebellion written for children and young adults, each of the contributors position themselves in relation to current discussions in the scholarly field of environmental research on children’s and YA literatures in their own ways. It is our hope that this collection of original articles may encourage environmental thinking and educational practices and help resist the dismantling of democratic and academic freedoms that are currently under pressure in many countries.

This article is about how Elsa, a young Sámi girl in Ann-Helén Laestadius’ Stolen, learns to resist hate crimes that seek to sever her roots in traditional Indigenous herding practices. The nine-year old Elsa witnesses the killing of her personal reindeer and is threatened into a decade-long silence by the killer. There are more attacks which we read as the violent enforcement of western linear time on traditional seasonal herding cycles. The novel charts Elsa’s coming-of-age as a rebel able to seek retribution not just for herself and her reindeer but also to fight for a vital future for her culture. We read Stolen together with “revolutionary theory” to show how imposed settler temporality is harmful to sustainable modes of living. We emphasise a range of eco-activist responses to the novel, among them rebel reading itself as one of several forms of political engagement available for the eco-rebel. We consider teaching Stolen at secondary school level focusing on how readers can practice risk-taking engagement with a text while learning “how to read our world now” in solidarity with Elsa’s struggle for her people’s survival within an ecologically and socially just future for all. Ultimately, Elsa’s emergent rebellion suggests forms of activism based on a commitment to ancestry, especially its future.

Focusing on a wide range of 20th and 21st-century novels from a diverse range of writers such as Madeline Miller, Jeff VanderMeer, Ursula LeGuin, N.K. Jemisin, Ambelin Kwaymullina and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, it suggests that readers take seriously the pedagogical potential of magic in literature for the classroom and beyond while providing them with contextualized, collective methods of climate action.

Teaching Literature in Times of Crisis looks at the range of different crises currently affecting students – from climate change and systemic racism, to the global pandemic.

Addressing the impact on students’ ability and motivation to learn as well as their emotional wellbeing, this volume guides teachers toward strategies for introducing both canonical and contemporary literature in ways that demonstrate the future relevance of sophisticated and targeted literacy skills. These reading practices are invaluable for framing and critically examining the challenges associated with crisis in order to help cope with grief and as a means to impart the skills needed to deal with crisis, such as adaptability, flexibility, resilience, and resistance. Providing necessary background theory, alongside practical case studies, the book addresses:

• Reading practices for demonstrating how literature explores ethical issues in specific and concrete rather than abstract terms
• Making connections between disparate phenomena, and how literature mobilises affect in individual and collective human lives
• Supporting teachers in considering new, imaginative ways students can learn from literary content and form in online or remote learning environments as well as face to face
• Combining close and distant reading with creative and hands-on strategies, presenting the principles of a transitional pedagogy for a world in flux.

This book introduces teachers to methods for reading and studying literature with the aim of strengthening and promoting resilience and resourcefulness in and out of the literature classroom and empower students as global citizens with local roles to play.

In my reading of Ballard's short story 'Dream Cargoes', I find a post-growth imaginary that focuses on a profound species-wide change of pace in the context of future nano- and biotech waste. I compare this to Tom Wolfe's heady account of the Merry Pranksters set during the Great Acceleration of the 1960s and 1970s. While Wolfe captured multiple fragmented points of view located in scattered time frames in his account of the Pranksters, Ballard is suggesting that time and its specific contemporary associations with extinction, renewability and futurity has become a central concern for humanity at large. I argue that literary representations of toxicity yield insight by awakening the reader to the ultimate limits of consumer culture. Thus, this essay offers an approach to fictions such as Ballard's and Wolfe's seeing them as essential resources for assessing toxicity in our lives as a source of insight as well as motivation to look for alternatives to petroculture.