Ecological Dread and Porous Selves: Climate Anxiety and Posthuman Futures in the Fiction of Daisy Hildyard
This paper critically examines climate anxiety and posthuman subjectivity in the works of British author Daisy Hildyard, focusing on The Second Body (2017) and Emergency (2022). Using ecocriticism, posthumanism, and affect theory, it explores how Hildyard’s writing expresses an environmental awareness that both challenges anthropocentric identity and emphasises the emotional experience of living amid rapid ecological crises. The study proposes that Hildyard constructs a ‘porous self,’ a subject whose mental and physical boundaries dissolve amid planetary crises, resulting in ecological dread that cannot be mitigated through conventional realist fiction or environmental philosophy. Results show that her fiction captures an ongoing tension between embodied experience and the vast scale of the Anthropocene, resulting in a narrative style that effectively conveys the psychological reality of climate anxiety.