"The Climate of the Real: Climate Realism and Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior".

This thesis argues for a generic categorization of Barbara Kingsolver's novel Flight Behavior as climate realism, a hybrid genre consisting of cli-fi which employs the techniques of the nineteenth-century realist novel. It further argues that Flight Behavior's status as climate realism, with the attendant expectations this raises concerning psychological complexity in its representation of human character, is the best lens through which to view the novel's central representational contribution to contemporary understandings of our societal response to climate change: that of denialism.