At long last, the realization that anthropogenic climate change is one of the greatest problems of our time is finding solid ground all over the world. The unfolding catastrophe now holds a central position in news reels, political debates, and protest movements. The discourse that is adopted around climate change is primarily one of catastrophe – and not without reason. These frequent discussions on the environmental destruction of our planet have a psychological effect on us as humans. Some examples of the conditions that have been documented so far are eco-anxiety (Pikhala), solastalgia (Galway et al), ecological grief (Cunsolo Wilcox), and Anthropocene horror (or: Anthropocene horror, Clark). Although these effects are predominantly studied in adults, there is every indication that children are also affected by these conditions. At the same time, children’s anxiety in the face of climate change takes a specific form due to the particular position young people occupy in relation to this catastrophe (Léger-Goodes et al; Hickman et al).

Literature has traditionally been a cultural resource that helps us navigate our fears and sorrows in turbulent times, so we might expect contemporary literature to be rived with stories that thematize our anxieties in the light of near-global environmental destruction. But oddly, climate change – considered as a socio-political catastrophe that effects our psychological well-being – remains a marginal theme in contemporary fiction (Chakrabarty; Ghosh; Anker). This is surprising especially in the field of children´s literature, because this genre has a long tradition of depicting human-nature relations. What is more, out of all contemporary socio-political debates that are held in the public sphere, none seems so often to be connected to young people as the question on climate change. Why then, does eco-anxiety remain an underexplored experience in contemporary children’s fiction?

In this article, I propose to explore the apparent absence of eco-anxiety in children’s fiction via Mark Bould’s conceptualization of the “Anthropocene unconscious.” I argue that this concept helps us to recognize how eco-anxiety is explored in two popular works of fiction for young readers: the global bestselling Harry Potter series and the Dutch modern classic Lampje. My analysis suggests that the fears and sorrows associated with climate change are in fact easily located in these works as lurking emotions that are hiding just behind the surface of these narratives.

From Great Derangement to Climate Catastrophe Culture

The observation that climate change is not occupying the central position in our literature that it holds in our minds has been commonplace for several years now. Amitav Ghosh argues that this gap in our literary imagination around climate change is an act of purposeful concealment. He predicts that future generations will look back at our age as The Great Derangement:  

“In a substantially altered world, when sea-levels rise has swallowed the Sundarbans and made cities like Kolkata, New York, and Bangkok uninhabitable, when readers and museumgoers turn to the art and literature of our time, will they not look, first and most urgently, for traces and portents of the altered world of their inheritance? And when they fail to find them, what should they – what can they – do other than to conclude that ours was a time when most forms of art and literature were drawn into the modes of concealment that prevented people from recognizing the realities of their plight? Quite possibly, then, this era, which congratulates itself on its self-awareness, will come to be known as the time of the Great Derangement” (11).

This dystopian image has made its mark on the critical understanding of (the lack of) environmental literature. Even if many have taken issue with subsections of Ghosh’ argument, it seems hard to deny that environmental anxiety mostly shines through its absence in contemporary fiction. However, critic Mark Bould does just that in his 2021 book called The Anthropocene Unconscious. In this short book, Bould outright denies Ghosh’s observation that contemporary fiction does not thematize climate change. In a rather contrarian move, Bould argues for quite the opposite: that we are, in fact, entrenched in a Climate Catastrophe Culture. However, much like we attempt to suppress our anxiety about climate change in our day-to-day lives, our literature also tries to evade straightforward mentions of the topic. We should not mistake this concealment for an absence of climate imagery, Bould argues. We simply need to learn how to identify the latent obsession we foster for the topic. Where Ghosh points at the overt gaps in our literature, Bould asks us to pay closer attention to the whispered conversations in the margins of our books. In order to locate these whispers, we will need to look beyond the surface level for the themes that are not always obvious at a first glance. He writes:

“Must fiction be immediately and explicitly about climate change? Is there no room for the symbolic? The oblique? The estranged? No room to think about the capitalist, imperialist, patriarchal histories, systems and structures that are historically and foreseeably responsible for climate destabilization, and through which it has, is and will be experienced? No room to consider texts that do not say ‘climate change’ out loud? To discover what happens if we stop assuming a text is not about climate change?” (4)

The Anthropocene, Bould argues, functions as the unconscious of the literature of our time: it is something our literature tries to hide, to suppress, to ignore, while it constantly seeps through the cracks of our cultural consciousness into our narratives. Building on Freud’s notion of the unconscious, Bould describes the cultural position of the Anthropocene as follows:

“Peristaltic and paradoxical, it is shifting, unstable, uncertain. It is ‘history pressing on the present and manifesting in disruptions and discourse’, slipping out in distorted forms – dreams, lapses, jokes, parapraxes, tweets, odd fixations, strange associations – from which the unconscious itself can only be retrospectively inferred.” (15)

Locating this unconscious preoccupation with climate change in our literary imagination requires us to be as much interested in the elements that made it into the text, as we are in the elements that were excluded from it. Moreso than working from Freud’s concept, however, Bould’s concept resembles Frederic Jameson’s work on the ‘political unconscious’. In his 1981 book with this same title, Jameson argues that literary texts are never created in a vacuum and always resonate larger socio-political preoccupations and structures of thinking. Even if an author does not intend to include larger socio-political contexts into their work, the author cannot help but bring the political conditions in which they work into their texts. Jameson posits that it is the task of the critic to locate the socio-political issues which the fictional work addresses as a symbolic act. Or, in Jameson’s famous words: “everything is ‘in the last analysis’ political” (20). Bould adapts this perspective to point out that everything, in the last analysis, relates to a sense of climate-related anxiety.

Following Jameson and Bould, we can understand any piece of fiction as a specific literary arrangement of ideas that is embedded in a larger body of ideas, motives and preoccupations. The critic, then, is able to trace our culture’s underlying preoccupation with the unfolding climate crisis in any literary work. Much like queer theory can address the moments of deviant pleasure and transgressions in a heteronormative narrative, eco-criticism can address “the silences, the denials and the resistance” (16) that indicate our suppressed eco-anxiety. To start this line of criticism, Bould encourages us to ask:  

“What happens when we stop assuming that the text is not about the anthropogenic biosphere crisis engulfing us? What if all the stories we tell are stories about the Anthropocene? About climate change?” (17)

Although Bould presents his theory as a rejection of Ghosh’s theory, I recognize in his proposition the same themes that were identified by Ghosh in the face of our stumped literary response to climate change: evasiveness, concealment, and frantic attempts to render invisible a catastrophe that is so massive that its denial seems like a form of mass delusion. Bould’s theory, therefore, should rather be understood as the logical next step in the discussion set out by Ghosh’s text.

One of the important ways in which Bould contributes to Ghosh’s argument, is by broadening the scope of the literary field. Ghosh, in his exploration of our literary imagination, is specifically occupied by what he calls “serious literary fiction.” This category seems to include mostly realist fiction with its roots in the 19th century novel. By tracing the origins of this subsection of the literary field, Ghosh identifies specific problems in these narrative structures that resists depicting the topic of climate change. Bould is interested in broadening the scope of this discussion to include fiction that functions in the margins of the cultural field. I should stress that these “margins” are defined in terms of critical appreciation, not in terms of popularity. Bould is interested in fictional narratives that are often snubbed by critics but receive warm welcomes from large audiences, including blockbuster action films, sci-fi TV series, and horror franchises. Although Bould does not include children’s media in his discussion, I argue that this genre – also understood as a critically marginalized literary genre – should be included in the project of locating and analyzing the Anthropocene unconscious. By locating these latent themes in the literary unconscious of children’s fiction, we can explore how children’s books address the different kinds of anxieties that the climate crisis is causing.

As a concrete starting point, I propose we first turn to the figure of the monster to locate these fears. Literary monsters give shapes and bodies to our fears which allow them to wonder out of our unconsciousness into our books. It has been argued many times that monsters serve as manifestations of suppressed anxieties – both personal and collective. Bould phrases this notion as follows:

“The fantastic expresses our fears and anxieties, our desires and sometimes even our hopes. Frankenstein’s monster embodies terrors of reproduction, foreshadows proletarian and anti-colonial revolution. King Kong rampaging through Manhattan enacts white fears of black masculinity and colonial comeuppance. Bodysnatching aliens are avatars of consumerist conformism. Robots are our dehumanised selves. Godzilla is the bomb. So the first thing you should always ask of a monster is: what does it represent?” (27)

In the analysis presented below, I will focus on the monsters that haunt our young protagonists and ask if and how these monsters might point at suppressed ecohorror. If we can indeed recognize eco-anxiety in these monstrous figures, we can take this as support for the presence of an Anthropocene unconscious in popular children’s literature.

The two works that I select for this analysis are the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling (1997-2007) and Lampje by Annet Schaap (2017; translated into English as Lampie by Laura Watkinson, published in 2020). Both books are marketed – at least in the Netherlands – towards readers between 12-15 years old. These cases are somewhat arbitrarily chosen, which aligns with the central premise that we inhabit a literary landscape that is unavoidably preoccupied with environmental anxiety. Therefore, it should not matter which cases I select for analysis. The only criteria I use in selecting these cases are, first: that the books should be recent enough that they can resonate with contemporary eco-anxiety, and second: that they have reached broad audiences. This second criterium should ensure that the texts resonate with large groups of readers. This criterium seems evident in relation to the first case, as the Harry Potter series is a global powerhouse that has reached record sales and has impacted the field of children’s writing for years. The second book, Lampje, is perhaps not as well-known by an international audience, but it is one of the most popular children’s books to have come out in the Netherlands in recent history. It has won a myriad of prices, including prestigious critical awards like the Woutertje Pieterse Prijs and the Gouden Griffel, but the book has also twice been voted the “most popular children’s book” by general readers in the Netherlands. It has been adapted into a theater play and a TV series. Including a more locally beloved book in this discussion allows me to include elements in my analysis that resonate with forms of climate anxieties that are specific to the Dutch context, such as a preoccupation with water and the dangers of living below sea level.

Case study I: Harry Potter

In the Harry Potter books, we follow the titular character from the age of 11 to the age of 17, while he attends Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry. Parallel to his magical education, Harry learns about the existence of the monstrous Voldemort, a dark wizard who killed legends of people – including Harry’s parents – in an attempt to set up a new magical world order. At the start of the narrative, Voldemort has mysteriously disappeared some ten years previously and although everyone would like to believe he is dead and gone, we find out that he is secretly working to come back to full strength and take up his evil plans for world domination. In the first three books of the series, this dreaded return to power is merely a vague and distant threat. It does not become a pressing concern until the end of fourth book when Voldemort finally returns to his full strengths.

When seen through an eco-critical lens, I propose that Voldemort’s rise to power resonates with our societal response to the realization that climate change is upon us. This resonance is first supported by the books’ descriptions of Voldemort, which portray him as someone both inhuman and inhumane. He is often described with sinister animal-like characteristics:

“His hands were like large, pale spiders; […] the red eyes, whose pupils were slits, like a cat’s, gleamed still more brightly in the darkness. […] Voldemort slipped one of those unnaturally long-fingered hands into a deep pocket […] Voldemort turned his scarlet eyes upon Harry, laughing a high, cold, mirthless laugh.” (698)

Voldemort’s hands are like spiders and his eyes are shaped like a cat’s. In this fear-inducing characterization we can recognize an overall ecophobia – a fear or contempt for the natural (Estok). This breaking down of barriers between the human and the inhuman is of course a characteristic feature of monsters, as it challenges the epistemological structures via which we attempt to control the world around us. (Cohen; Christie) This challenge to ontological categories is further emphasized by the description of his “unnaturally long-fingered hands” which places Voldemort outside of our common understanding of a body, and his “high, cold, mirthless laugh” which indicates a lack of human moral orientation. These non-human characteristics place Voldemort outside the realm of the human, and outside the realm of human control. These are key ingredients in the monsters that inhabit the ecoGothic: a subgenre of ecophobic literature that combines a general fear of nature with the Gothic fear of losing control of one’s life and one’s world (Keetley and Sivils). The fear that Voldemort installs in the other wizards is evident throughout the books. Wizards refer to him in hushed voices, do not even dare to speak his name, while they speculate about his otherworldly destructive powers. He is, overall, an unnatural and unstoppable nature-like force that threatens the world order the humans have built. However, the ecophobic or ecoGothic monster does not in itself constitute a clear indication of the Anthropocene unconscious. Although this type of monster clearly indicates a troubled relationship between humans and their natural environment, it does not necessarily indicate a preoccupation with climate catastrophe. This can be deduced from the fact that both ecophobia and the ecoGothic predate our cultural awareness of anthropogenic climate change.

More than in Voldemort’s appearance, I argue, we can recognize climate catastrophe culture in the ways different parties respond to the increasing threat he personifies. Harry himself was present when Voldemort returned to his full power and understands the immediacy of the threat that he poses to the world. When Harry reports on this, not everyone is ready to belief him. Most notably, the highest political power in the wizarding world, the Ministry for Magic, refuses to take any responsibility in the fight against this destructive force. Upon hearing that Voldemort has returned, the Minister for Magic himself refuses to take any action. Not necessarily because he does not believe the story, but mostly because an acknowledgement of the threat would force him to take politically unpopular decisions and undermine his authority as the leader of the wizarding community.

We recognize this in the conversation he has with the character Dumbledore, who proposes seemingly obvious and necessary countermeasures to Voldemort’s rise to power. The Minister refuses to act and justifies this by remarks such as: “’I’d be kicked out of office for suggesting it!’” (766), and: “You – you cannot be serious! […] If the magical community got wind that I had approached the giants – people hate them, Dumbledore – end of my career –.” (767) The book drives home the minister’s disingenuous position against the threat in his final words on the matter: “Finally, he said, with a plea in his voice, ‘He can’t be back, Dumbledore, he just can’t be …’” (769). On multiple occasions, the Minister of Magic expresses his unwillingness to belief – let alone to act on – Voldemort’s return out of fear for relinquishing the powerful position he holds in the existing political structure. This attitude by the governmental authority is easily recognized as mirroring existing positions by heads of state all around the world (McGregor and Kosman). The unwillingness of powerful institutions to act and protect citizens from an impending catastrophe constitutes another type of fear that is obviously related to climate change. Young people in particular have been vocal in expressing this anxiety because they hold next to no political power themselves and are therefore even more dependent on responsible leadership than adult citizens. The frustration that is born from the unwillingness to respond to climate change has recently even resulted in some of the largest protest marches in history (Frazee, Van der Beek).

Interlude: this seems an appropriate moment to acknowledge that this entire paper is inspired by a throw away comment by podcasters Hannah McGregor & Marcelle Kosman in their show called Witch, please. I cannot recommend this podcast strong enough to anyone interested in a fun yet critical reading of the Harry Potter franchise.

Fragment from the podcast Witch, Please

I propose that we can recognize in this sentiment a particular type of fear that Timothy Clark calls Anthropocene horror: an emotional response to climate change perceived as a threat that lies completely out of our control. Anthropocene horror constitutes an undefined fear that does not strike us as a personal assault but rather as a shared, collective failure. Clark’s concept highlights the acute sense of our own fragility in the face of the global destruction of the biosphere: “a feeling of inadequacy, of being the target of ethical demands that exceed anything one could do in combating global environmental wrongs” (68). This horror leaves us feeling fragile and desperately out of our depth. We can easily trace these elements of Anthropocene horror in the Harry Potter books that follow. In the fifth book, which opens shortly after Voldemort has returned, we see how the then 15-year-old Harry and a group of supportive peers, are systematically undermined, ridiculed, and accused of unnecessarily inflammatory discourse via a series of slanderous newspaper articles, an unsubstantiated courtroom case, and excessive punitive measures by a Ministry-appointed teacher. This drives a wedge between Harry and the rest of the wizarding community, who does not belief that Voldemort has returned and buy into the Ministry’s propaganda that Harry has become unhinged. Clark includes these feelings of isolation and alienation in his analysis of the effects of Anthropocene horror when he points out that: “someone suffering badly from Anthropocene horror is bound to seem “unbalanced” from the viewpoint of others in “normal” life, as most environmental activists know only too well” (65). Viewed via an eco-critical lens, I argue that Harry’s narrative resonates with some of the key points of Anthropocene horror. Prime among them the feelings of inadequacy and hopelessness in the face of an obvious threat, and the alienation and disconnect between members of one community that is born from different ways of (not) responding to this threat.

As a final remark, I want to point out that the main argument that the Ministry of Magic uses for the denial of Harry’s claim that Voldemort has returned is the improbability of this narrative. I propose to include this argument in our discussion here because it resonates with an important claim in Ghosh’s analysis. In his discussion on the absence of climate change in the modern novel, he identifies the notion of (im)probability as a central problem (16). The modern novel, Ghosh points out, came about in a time that was interested in foregrounding the predictability of everyday life, the regularity of a bourgeois existence. This interest in the predictable resonates with the socio-political context in which the modern novel was established: it demonstrates an interest in a way of life that can be rationalized and regulated, that lends itself to administration and economy. However, this focus banishes to the background anything that is exceptional and unlikely, because it creates a literary form that cannot speak of things that exceed the predictable. Therefore, Ghosh argues, it is not surprising that contemporary literature cannot formulate a response to climate change. For climate change requires us to normalize the exceptional. Crisis and catastrophe, previously belonging to the realm of exceptionality, are now becoming part of our daily reality. While the modern novel tries to hold on to a 19th century depiction of nature as moderate and orderly, the reality of our time requires a conception of nature that includes the exceptional, the unregulated, and the improbable. “Here, then, is the irony of the “realist” novel,” Ghosh points out, “the very gestures with which it conjures up reality are actually a concealment of the real” (23). In the case of the Minister for Magic, we see how the bourgeois resistance to improbability – the improbability of Voldemort’s return to power – is weaponized as means to stall any responsible reaction to the threat posed by Voldemort, whose destructive powers seem to extend beyond the powers of the wizarding government.

In concluding the analysis of this first case study, I argue that Harry Potter quite easily allows for an ecocritical reading that indicates an underlying climate catastrophe culture. The characters’ fearful responses to the series’ main monster Voldemort are recognized as mirroring socio-political responses in the light of climate change. We can trace both personal instances of coping with Anthropocene horror in protagonist Harry (including feelings of hopelessness, helplessness, inadequacy, and alienation) and socio-political responses by the political powers that structure the magical world of the wizarding community (including a preoccupation with maintaining the status quo and a disregard for young people’s fates in the face of overpowering danger).

Case study II: Lampje

Lampje tells the story of a girl whom everyone calls Lampje, which translates as “little lamp.” Lampje lives in a lighthouse with her grief-stricken father who has made the young girl responsible for lighting the lighthouse’s lamp every night. She spends her days isolated from the rest of the community, alternately neglected and bullied by her father, collecting seashells on the shore and working the lighthouse lamp. In her state of isolation, Lampje has started to communicate with her inanimate surroundings. These communications are mostly of a violent nature. When a match refuses to be lit, she threatens it: “Doe je best! Ik meen het, hoor! […] “Anders gooi ik je in zee,” fluistert ze. “Word je zo nat dat je nooit meer zal branden.” (Lampje 10-11; “Do your best! I mean it! […] Or I’ll throw you in the sea,” she whispers. “And you’ll be so wet that you’ll never burn again.” Lampie 17) The book continues to break down the barriers between the human and the inhuman. This can be recognized in the title of the book, which refers to the young protagonist by way of the thing she is most closely connected to.

It also plays an important role in the inciting incident of the narrative, which finds Lampje out by herself in a storm trying to get home in time to light the lighthouse lamp. On her journey, as in many other scenes in the book, she uses anthropomorphic language to describe her struggles with natural forces. She describes the uneven path that connects the peninsula with the mainland as “een slecht gebid” (Lampje 14; “a set of bad teeth”, Lampie 21). When the storm slams the door shut behind her, she makes it a point to thank it for its help in closing the door, because “[t]egen de storm kun je maar beter beleefd zijn” (Lampje 13; “It’s always best to be polite to the wind”, Lampie 21). She hopes the storm will prove to be kind to her and act like “een soort vriend” (Lampje 14, “a bit like a friend”, Lampie 21). There seems to be a miscommunication between the girl and the storm, however, as she is struggling to remain standing while the storm playfully offers her presents in the form of sand and other bits and pieces that it blows into her face. The storm speaks to her: “Cadeautjes, Lampje. Kijk!” (Lampje 14, emphasis in original text, “Presents, Lampie. Look!”, Lampie 21). Lampje attempts to assert her own will, first via commands (“Ophouden nou [..] Ga liggen, wind. Af!” Lampje 14, “Stop it. Now! […] Get off, wind! Down!”, Lampie 21) and then via pleas (“Lieve wind, nijdige wind. Ik hoef niks. Alleen maar lucifers.” Lampje 14, “Dear wind, angry wind. I don’t need them, thank you. I don’t need anything. All I need is matches.” Lampie 21) But despite her attempts to communicate with it, the increasingly resentful storm eventually attempts to drown Lampje in the equally angry sea. It is significant that the first monstrous entity that is encountered in this book is located at the seaside. For Dutch readers, water, storms and floodings have always been the most directly threatening natural force. [1] With large parts of our country located below sea level, we started our battle with the sea many decades ago. In more recent years, the sea has become the poster child for climate change’s destructive potential, with increasing storms and rising sea levels being recurring themes in Dutch discussions on the upcoming climate catastrophe. It is no surprise, therefore, that this popular Dutch book models its monstrous threats by using sea-related imagery.

In this scene, the environment that Lampje feels most at home in – the seaside, the shore – becomes a place of danger and fear. The anthropomorphization of the storm and the sea that is used in this scene adds an uncanny dimension to this transformation. This manifestation of the uncanny, that links the uncanny to natural forces, is labeled by Ghosh as ‘the environmental uncanny’ (30-33). He points as this literary motive as indicative of one of the key ingredients in the experience of climate anxiety. Ghosh recognizes this experience specifically in a sudden awareness of nonhuman interlocutors in the context of climate change. In this context, creatures and entities that we previously thought of as passive are forcing us to acknowledge their interventions: rivers that flood human settlements, animals that extend their habitat into cityscapes, desserts that expand and force the migration of entire communities. What is more, the recognition of agency in these previously ignored entities comes with the realization that this agency was always already there, just beyond the limits of our perception. It brings in the uncomfortable understanding that what we thought to be merely an object of our observations and discussions, was always already looking back at us, talking back at us. This dialogue between the human and the nonhuman is a constant throughout Lampje. What is more, the dialogue is mostly a violent one. It expresses power negotiations and the desire to dominate. We can clearly recognize in this exchange the uncomfortable and threatening realization that humans are not the only, or even the main inhabitants of this earth. The book thematizes our struggle to come to terms with the acknowledgement of our nonhuman neighbors and the power they reveal to have over us.

Similarly, Clark argues that this shift in our relation to landscapes is an important site for experiencing Anthropocene horror. He refers to experiences in which a landscape that was previously experienced as passively welcoming, is turned into an actively antagonistic space: “[a site that] was recently normal transmutes, without any alteration in its separate make-up, into something latently violent” (65). The realization that there is a hostility lurking underneath the natural spaces we thought were free for us to occupy, results in a feeling of entrapment that is intertwined with Anthropocene horror: “One of the traditional functions of the concept of nature was to name a space of supposed externality, not the other of “culture,” but more literally its outside” (68). For Lampje, the seaside has always been an important space to turn towards outside the house she inhabits with her abusive father. This violent confrontation with the storm and the sea effectively takes this space away from her. The entrapment that this results in takes a very concrete shape, as Lampje is taken away from the lighthouse after almost being swallowed by the sea and relocated to a remote castle-like mansion surrounded by high walls that Lampje cannot leave.

After the instigating incident on the seaside, the battle for control continuous between humans, part-humans, and non-humans. In fact, the main plot of the book can be seen as attempt to formulate a moral response to this conflict. For Lampje is not the only one entrapped in the mansion: in the attic of this building lives Vis (translation: Fish – another character with a non-human name). Vis is revealed to be half-human and half-mermaid. His human father perceives his son as an abomination and a disgrace, and sees his son’s hybrid body as a lack of character and commitment to becoming fully human. The father refuses to belief that this half-human body cannot be bullied into human form by sheer force. Vis is therefore locked in the attic where he is forced to transform himself into a fully human boy. The unsuccessful methods that are employed in this project include refusing Vis his beloved salty bathwater, full social isolation, and a painful surgery that attempts to cut his fish tale into two separate human-like legs.

Ghosh points at the human fear for the hybrid as another source of our incapability to represent climate change in the modern novel (71). The modern novel, he explains, struggles to include human-nature hybridity into its narratives. This is a result of the strict anthropocentric world view that was prevalent when this literary form was installed as the dominant form of expression. This excluded the development of literary strategies that depict anything outside of strictly human experiences. Much like Vis's bullying father, the modern novel refuses to make space for a deviation from the strictly human form. An unfortunate result from the human-centered outlook of the modern novel, is that any literary text that does chose to thematize nature or the nonhuman, is immediately relocated to the margins of the literary field as instances of science fiction or fantasy (72). As such, these imaginations of the ways in which humans and nonhumans intersect and interact are banished to the realms of the unrealistic, which again reinforces the idea that hybridity is a non-realistic state of being. This poses a problem in times of the Anthropocene, when we are in dire need of realizing that hybridity is in fact more common than purely human or purely non-human entities.

Children’s literature can place some interesting nuances in this debate, as realism is far from a necessary element in critically acclaimed books for children as it is in books for adults. Many of the most high-regarded books for young readers are fantastical in nature and might therefore reinstate the human/non-human hybrid at the center of our literary imagination. Lampje gives a good example in this project by becoming the first character in the book who does not attempt to change Vis’s hybridity, but rather attempts to change the environment that has not allowed Vis to live a comfortable life. Through their unfolding friendship, Vis becomes less aggressive and more collaborative. Eventually, Lampje helps Vis to escape the castle and build a new life in the open sea while staying in contact with his human friends. The narrative models a moral response to hybrid creatures such as Vis: not to forcefully submit him to human rules, but rather to allow him to live his true, sea-like life.

In concluding this second case study, I argue that an ecocritical reading of Lampje brings to light the book’s latent preoccupation with climate catastrophe culture. Much like in the first case study, we can recognize eco-anxiety in both the personal realm (Lampje’s own power negotiation with natural forces and a shifting landscape) and the social realm (society’s insistence to reign in the power of the sea and the freedom of its sea creatures – personified by Vis’s father and the different adult institutions that decide on both Lampje’s and Vis’s fates). The book not only thematizes the Dutch readers’ fearful relationship with the sea but invites us into a moral consideration of this increasingly troublesome relationship.

Conclusion

This article proposed to address the apparent lack of representations of eco-anxiety in contemporary children’s fiction via Bould’s concept of the Anthropocene unconscious. When starting from the assumption that we live in a climate catastrophe culture, an ecocritical reading of both Harry Potter and Lampje quite easily yielded themes that indicate a latent preoccupation with climate change and the accompanying conditions of ecophobia, ecoGothic, and Anthropocene horror. As with all ideologically minded interpretation models, however, it remains to be tested what the value of this model is. Like the proverbial chicken and the egg, it is hard to say which came first: the latent eco-anxiety content or the eco-critical reading. This article should therefore be considered a first effort to explore both the validity and the usefulness of Bould’s theory for the field of children’s literature – one that will have to be reproduced via a larger set of case studies.

At the same time, however, this is an invitation to explore what the field of children’s literature can bring to a critical discussion on the lack of eco-anxiety in the literary imagination – discussion that is, until now, mostly framed in the context of adult literature. I argue that much like the marginalized genres explored by Bould (including horror movies and Sci-Fi narratives), children’s fiction can make important contributions to the way climate catastrophe culture is thematized in contemporary fiction. These first two case studies already indicate some of the contributions that children’s literature can make to this discussion. First, by centering children rather than adults, the genre can add new experiences of climate anxiety to the debate that are more urgently felt by children then by adults. Second, as children’s literature criticism does not dismiss the fantastic and the uncanny as non-serious or inferior, children’s literature can explicitly include discussions on some key themes of climate change culture that are expelled from serious adult literature, including hybridity, the monstrous, and the environmental uncanny. The dialogue between the Anthropocene unconscious and the field of children’s literature therefore seems a fruitful one.

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Bould, Mark. The Anthropocene Unconscious: Climate Catastrophe Culture. Verso Books, 2021.

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[1] A small nuance: this observation relates to Dutch readers living in the European parts of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Different climatological threats apply to citizens who live in the parts of the Netherlands located in the Caribbean region. For a short critical discussion on this, see: Van der Beek & Lehmann, 2022. For information on the changing climatological effects on the Caribbean parts of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, see: IPCC.