Early Anthropocene Literature in Britain, 1750-1884

ISBN-13: 9783030532451 / Angielski / Twarda / 2020 / 246 str.

Seth T. Reno

Spis treści

 

EARTH

 

1. The Cradle of the Anthropocene

            Outline of the Book

            Rethinking Earth: Deep Time and the Deep Space Sublime

            Remaking Earth: The Industrial and Agricultural Revolutions

            Looking to the Skies: Early Climatology and the Science of Global Warming

 

FIRE

 

2. Volcanoes and Industrialization in Early Anthropocene Literature

            Volcanoes and Industry in the Eighteenth Century

            Laki, Tambora, and the Damnable Picturesque

            Volcanoes and Industry in the Nineteenth Century

            Krakatoa and Climate Science

            The Human Volcano

 

WATER

 

3. Rivers, Canals, and Commerce in the Early Anthropocene

            Coal, Canals, and the River Tyne

            Ecotourism and Conservation in the Lake District

            Dirty Father Thames

            Rivers as Liquid History

 

AIR

 

4. Clouds and Climate Change in the Nineteenth Century

            Clouds and Early Climatology

            Science and Futurity: Literary Clouds

            Cloud Art: Turner and Constable

            Endurance and Sustainability: The Wordsworths’ Hopeful Vision

            Manufactured Clouds in the Late Nineteenth Century

            The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century

 

Epilogue: Modernism and the Anthropocene

            Time and Weather in Eliot and Woolf

            Conclusion

 

O autorze

Seth T. Reno is Associate Professor of English at Auburn University Montgomery, USA. He is author of Amorous Aesthetics: Intellectual Love in Romantic Poetry and Poetics, 1788–1853 (2019), editor of Romanticism and Affect Studies (2018), and co-editor of Wordsworth and the Green Romantics: Affect and Ecology in the Nineteenth Century (2016). 

Blurb

This book questions when exactly the Anthropocene began, uncovering an “early Anthropocene” in the literature, art, and science of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. In chapters organized around the classical elements of Earth, Fire, Water, and Air, Seth Reno shows how literary writers of the Industrial Era borrowed from scientists to capture the changes they witnessed to weather, climate, and other systems. Poets linked the hellish flames of industrial furnaces to the magnificent, geophysical force of volcanic explosions. Novelists and painters depicted cloud formations and polluted urban atmospheres as part of the emerging discipline of climate science. In so doing, the subjects of Reno’s study—some famous, some more obscure—gave form to a growing sense of humans as geophysical agents, capable of reshaping Earth itself. Situated at the interaction of literary studies, environmental studies, and science studies, Early Anthropocene Literature in Britain tells the story of how writers heralded, and wrestled with, Britain’s role in sparking the now-familiar “epoch of humans.”