This paper analyzes elements of the Bildungsroman in climate fiction (cli-fi) and
shows how these contribute to the depiction of children’s resilience in the texts.
The article provides the theoretical background for linking the Bildungsroman
to climate fiction and definitions of resilience, and then uses this as a starting
point to consider Lily Brooks-Dalton’s The Light Pirate (2022) and passages from
Jessie Greengrass’ The High House (2021). My analysis shows that The Light
Pirate suggests a utopian co-evolution of humans and nature, while The High
House implies a continued struggle in the face of climate disaster. Both novels
alter the nature-to-culture paradigm of the Bildungsroman of the past—the same
paradigm that served to naturalize the acculturation of the individual into the
cultural order of capitalism—while The Light Pirate also includes the nonhuman
into the idea of culture by imagining how culture can exist within nature. In this
process, depicting children’s agency and resilience models a way to navigate the
environmental transformations that are to come. The aim of this paper is to show
the Bildungsroman’s renewed relevance regarding the portrayal of agency and
resilience of children in the climate crisis, since the genre is uniquely positioned to
criticize the representation of the process of a movement from nature to culture
that has defined its own literary history.