Biodiversity in Fiction

Objective

"Declining biodiversity is the defining challenge of our time. We are living through the greatest loss of biodiversity in human history: the Earth's sixth mass extinction. Yet, little is known about the human subjective experience of biodiversity. BIOFICTION explores the significantly understudied topic of how we perceive and portray biodiversity outside of scientific discourse, through the lens of fiction. Tigers, lions and other charismatic megafauna dominate the environmental imagination of children, but is the same true of adults? BIOFICTION uses close-reading and aggregate statistics on species richness in fiction to explore our environmental imagination and biases, which are key for conservation efforts. By including Indigenous fictions and writings from biodiversity hotspots, BIOFICTION elevates marginalized voices. BIOFICTION develops the concept of biodiversity in fiction, mapping it before its scientific conceptualization, resulting in the most comprehensive study on animals in modern fiction and the first book entirely dedicated to biodiversity in fiction. Being an accomplished modernist with five published articles on enumerations of animals in fiction, I am uniquely qualified to lead this project. My supervisor, Professor Horn, is the most qualified to help me extend, connect, conceptualize and develop these findings under the umbrella term ""biodiversity,"" seeing as she is a world leader in ecocriticism and the head of the Vienna Anthropocene network; and accomplished in a complementary modernist field to me. In the face of global warming and unprecedented planetary biodiversity loss, BIOFICTION has urgent implications for how we articulate, value and understand biodiversity richness, outside of scientific discourse."