Narrating Panarchy in the Anthropocene: The Adaptive (Short Story) Cycle in Rebecca Campbell’s Arboreality

This article contributes to Anthropocene studies and narratology by examining how Rebecca Campbell’s Arboreality (2022) uses the aesthetics of the short story cycle to represent the complexities and paradoxes of socio-ecological crisis. It argues that the form’s defining features—circularity, fragmentation, interconnection, and its oscillation between closure and open-endedness—mirror the recursive, rhizomatic dynamics of panarchy theory, which conceptualizes resilience through adaptive cycles of growth, conservation, release, and reorganization across nested human and nonhuman systems. While resilience theory is being increasingly applied in literary and cultural studies, the narratological significance of the short story cycle as a form structurally homologous to panarchic cycles remains underexplored. By bringing these frameworks into dialogue, the article addresses this critical gap, showing how literary form itself can register ecological crisis and renewal in the Anthropocene.