Early Anthropocene Literature in Britain, 1750-1884

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 inBritain tells the story of how writers heralded, and wrestled with, Britain's role in sparking the now-familiar "epoch of humans."

Auteur

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, 17881853 (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).

Texte du rabat

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 studysome famous, some more obscuregave 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.

Contenu

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