Western American Literature

The opening image of Kate Rigby's Dancing with Disaster is an unsettling description of the "hurricane of flame" sweeping down on the author's childhood home of Canberra in 2003 (1). Ten years later, the "Angry Summer" of 2012–13 pummeled Australia with a perfect storm of "natural" disasters: heat, fires, and floods. The cultural responses to these disasters ultimately inspired the central question of Rigby's book: how humanities research "might provide an enhanced understanding of the complex interplay between cultural factors and geophysical processes in the genesis, unfolding, and aftermath of calamities" as climate change increases their frequency and scope (2). Although it is now seven years since the book's publication, it is both a testament to its urgency and a sign of the times [End Page 394] that in that span numerous record-breaking environmental disasters have again altered our image of the earth. To name just three: Australia's "Black Summer" of 2019–20, which saw unprecedented fire damage to life and land; the Atlantic hurricane season of 2020, the most active on record; and the concurrent arrival—it almost feels absurd to write—of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020.

Even without the buildup of calamities since 2015, Rigby's book presents a prescient ecocritical history of the idea of "natural disaster" and how our species has responded—or might respond—when it happens, by situating literary narratives in the context of historical, philosophical, and political responses to disasters throughout the world. The book's chapters are further organized according to five "elements" that, in their too-much-ness, can present as natural disasters: earth, water, fire, air, and, with eerie foresight, disease. By conceptualizing the book this way, Rigby grounds her texts in the physical world and so organizes the unruly threads of past and present, science and religion, fact and fiction, and the local and global into a conceptually complete image of the "natural" and anthropogenic situatedness of disaster.

Each chapter focuses on a particular historical disaster and offers a thorough analysis of a literary work, often from (or just beyond) the canonical periphery, that provides an example of storytelling that Rigby argues challenges the status quo of disaster response in meaningful ways. The chapter "Moving Earth," after a thorough reading of the aftershocks in European thought set off by the 1755 earthquake in Lisbon, discusses Heinrich von Kleist's novella The Earthquake in Chile. The chapter "Spreading Pestilence" examines the "'creeping' catastrophe" of contagious disease and analyzes Mary Shelley's lesser-known novel The Last Man (52). Chapter Three, "Breaking Waves," follows Theodor Storm's 1888 novella The Dykemaster. "Proliferating Fire," a chapter quite close to home for Rigby, looks at a range of Australian texts, with Colin Thiele's 1965 children's book February Dragon as its centerpiece. The final chapter, "Driving Winds," reads the 2006 novel Carpentaria by Alexis Wright, one of Australia's foremost Aboriginal writers. Throughout these chapters Rigby situates her literary analysis in the historically shifting sands that give rise to the texts, noting how global societies—primarily those that arose in colonial Europe—have [End Page 395] variously imagined the origin of disaster (an act of God or gods, the whimsy of an ambivalent Nature, hubris, etc.) in order to examine the imaginatively instructive responses literature can offer.

Methodologically, Rigby's book is a mature example of ecocriticism: it draws from several theoretical traditions without feeling scattered. It historicizes its texts without reducing itself to mere historicism. It situates its authorial self in the subject matter but reads as neither too personal nor too dispassionate. There is a welcoming humility in the text that bolsters its argumentation. In the chapter on Carpentaria, for example, Rigby admits her own disorientation as a non-Indigenous reader in the encounter with its "style of storytelling and the geocultural world to which it belongs" (156)—what Wright terms a "spinning multi...