Inspired by recent developments in the environmental humanities and “econarratology” (Erin James’s term), the NARMESH team has built on a diverse set of methodologies to explore contemporary narrative’s engagement with human-nonhuman interrelation and its dramatic manifestations in the present moment, particularly climate change. We have collected and analyzed, from a stylistic and narratological perspective, two sets of fictional narratives falling into the genres of “new weird” fiction and “lab literature”: the former foregrounds the strangeness of human-nonhuman enmeshment, whereas the latter offers a critique of scientific work in a more realist setting. In parallel, we have collected nonfictional stories dealing with environmental issues in a series of interviews with scientists, environmental activists, and climate change skeptics. We studied the way in which stories can embed (but also challenge) anthropocentric ideas both at the level of plot and theme and at the level of form. Indeed, the project’s main ambition was to show that formal strategies, in both fictional and nonfictional stories, already engage with and negotiate the “mesh” of human-nonhuman relations. In the project’s final phase, we have turned to narrative audiences and conducted interviews to study how fictional narratives may impact readers’ imagination of the nonhuman world, with particular focus on the ascription of agency to nonhuman entities and processes. This shows how reading fiction can have a significant impact on people’s understanding of human-nonhuman relations, although follow-up work is needed to examine whether this is a long-term impact. In the five years of project, we presented our findings at dozens of international conferences, including the annual conferences of the International Society for the Study of Narrative (ISSN), the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), and the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE). Our work has appeared in all of the main journals in the fields traversed by NARMESH research, from Environmental Humanities to PMLA and Narrative Inquiry. The team members have published a number of monographs, one edited collection, and one special issue, all with well-respected international publishers and in series that have high visibility in the ecocritical and narratological communities.
