Early Anthropocene Literature in Britain, 1750–1884

Early Anthropocene Literature in Britain, 1750–1884 PDF Author: Seth T. Reno
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030532461
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
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.”

Early Anthropocene Literature in Britain, 1750–1884

Early Anthropocene Literature in Britain, 1750–1884 PDF Author: Seth T. Reno
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030532461
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.”

Writing Romantic Climate Change

Writing Romantic Climate Change PDF Author: Anya Heise-von der Lippe
Publisher: transcript Verlag
ISBN: 383947275X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
In the Romantic period, women writers developed specific aesthetics and writing strategies in their engagements with climate change and climate catastrophe. Anya Heise-von der Lippe draws on intersectional feminist and ecocritical approaches to highlight gender as a complicating category in Romantic engagements with these topics. She addresses the ways in which gendered critical framings continue to resonate in current Anthropocene discourses that use Romantic conceptualizations of »Nature«, impacting contemporary approaches to the relationship between humans and non-humans in the ongoing climate catastrophe.

The Anthropocene

The Anthropocene PDF Author: Seth T. Reno
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 100047433X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
Perhaps no concept has become dominant in so many fields as rapidly as the Anthropocene. Meaning "The Age of Humans," the Anthropocene is the proposed name for our current geological epoch, beginning when human activities started to have a noticeable impact on Earth’s geology and ecosystems. Long embraced by the natural sciences, the Anthropocene has now become commonplace in the humanities and social sciences, where it has taken firm enough hold to engender a thoroughgoing assessment and critique. Why and how has the geological concept of the Anthropocene become important to the humanities? What new approaches and insights do the humanities offer? What narratives and critiques of the Anthropocene do the humanities produce? What does it mean to study literature of the Anthropocene? These are the central questions that this collection explores. Each chapter takes a decidedly different humanist approach to the Anthropocene, from environmental humanities to queer theory to race, illuminating the important contributions of the humanities to the myriad discourses on the Anthropocene. This volume is designed to provide concise overviews of particular approaches and texts, as well as compelling and original interventions in the study of the Anthropocene. Written in an accessible style free from disciplinary-specific jargon, many chapters focus on well-known authors and texts, making this collection especially useful to teachers developing a course on the Anthropocene and students undertaking introductory research. This collection provides truly innovative arguments regarding how and why the Anthropocene concept is important to literature and the humanities.

British literature and archaeology, 1880–1930

British literature and archaeology, 1880–1930 PDF Author: Angela Blumberg
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 152616146X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
British literature and archaeology, 1880-1930 reveals how British writers and artists across the long turn of the twentieth century engaged with archaeological discourse—its artefacts, landscapes, bodies, and methods—uncovering the materials of the past to envision radical possibilities for the present and future. This project traces how archaeology shaped major late-Victorian and modern discussions: informing debates over shifting gender roles; facilitating the development of queer iconography and the recovery of silenced or neglected histories; inspiring artefactual forgery and transforming modern conceptions of authenticity; and helping writers and artists historicise the traumas of the First World War. Ultimately unearthing archaeology at the centre of these major discourses, this book simultaneously positions literary and artistic engagements with the archaeological imagination as forms of archaeological knowledge in themselves.

Deep Time

Deep Time PDF Author: Noah Heringman
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691235791
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
"Deep Time: A Literary History challenges the exclusive association between deep time and the modern science of geology by focusing on late Enlightenment writings that used narrative form to integrate new empirical data and methods with Western and non-Western traditions of chronology, earth history, and human origins. Choosing the mid-eighteenth century as a starting point, Heringman aims to demonstrate how deep time became associated with Earth history in the first place, expanding its conceptual domain to include colonial natural history, oral tradition, and scientific romance-all frontiers of the expanded time horizons associated with modernity. It considers the conceptual opening of a modern geological timescale in literary, scientific, and travel writing in the late-Enlightenment/Romantic period, with chapters on the explorer-naturalist team of John Reinhold and George Forster, who sailed with Captain Cook (1772-1775); Buffon's protogeochronological Epochs of Nature (1778); Herder, Blake, and prehistory through oral tradition; and Charles Darwin's dialogue with anthropology and archaeology, especially in The Descent of Man (1871). When eighteenth- and nineteenth-century explorers, naturalists, poets, and philosophers wrote about the "abyss of time," they referred to a large and diverse set of new ideas that unsettled the established time scale: ideas about cultural evolution inspired by Pacific peoples recently encountered by James Cook and other voyagers; a new sense of the depth and diversity of the Earth's strata, produced by increased attention to their structure and deposition; the study of oral traditions by poets and scholars associated with the ballad revival; and the study of non-Western scriptures such as the Mahabharata, which calculated time on an entirely different scale. The latter two pursuits dovetailed with the investigations of voyagers from Johann Reinhold Forster to Charles Darwin, who sought to measure the age of non-European civilizations by way of the geological age of their environments. Ultimately, Heringman argues that the concept of deep time, now associated primarily with modern geology, "was a composite of human and natural history to begin with.""--

Nature and Literary Studies

Nature and Literary Studies PDF Author: Peter Remien
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108877877
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 771

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Book Description
Nature and Literary Studies supplies a broad and accessible overview of one of the most important and contested keywords in modern literary studies. Drawing together the work of leading scholars of a variety of critical approaches, historical periods, and cultural traditions, the book examines nature's philosophical, theological, and scientific origins in literature, as well as how literary representations of this concept evolved in response to colonialism, industrialization, and new forms of scientific knowledge. Surveying nature's diverse applications in twenty-first-century literary studies and critical theory, the volume seeks to reconcile nature's ideological baggage with its fundamental role in fostering appreciation of nonhuman being and agency. Including chapters on wilderness, pastoral, gender studies, critical race theory, and digital literature, the book is a key resource for students and professors seeking to understand nature's role in the environmental humanities.

The Edge of the Plain: How Borders Make and Break Our World

The Edge of the Plain: How Borders Make and Break Our World PDF Author: James Crawford
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1324037059
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 383

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Book Description
A wide-ranging journey through the history of borders and an exploration of their role in shaping our world today. Since the earliest known marker denoting the edge of one land and the beginning of the next—a stone column inscribed with Sumerian cuneiform—borders have been imagined, mapped, moved, and fought over. In The Edge of the Plain, James Crawford skillfully blends history, travel writing, and reportage to trace these borderlines throughout history and across the globe. What happens on the ground when we impose lines on a map that contradict how humans have always lived—and moved? Crawford confronts that question from bloody territorial disputes in Mesopotamia, to the Sápmi lands of Scandinavia, the shifting boundaries of the Israel-Palestine conflict, efforts to build a wall on the United States-Mexico border, and the dangerous border crossings pursued by migrants into Europe. And yet the role of borders extends beyond specific sites of conflict. On the largest scale, borders define the limits of empire—the two walls in Britain that once represented the northwestern edge of the Roman Empire; the mythological eastern gate supposedly closed off by Alexander the Great; China’s virtual “Great Firewall.” On the smallest, human scale, cell walls are the last physical barrier against disease, after lines of quarantine have failed. Finally, as The Edge of the Plain reveals, humans have not only made their mark on the landscape: the landscape itself is now changing, more and more rapidly due to climate change. Crawford introduces us to both the Alpine watershed—one such shifting, natural borderline—and the “Great Green Wall” in Africa, envisioned as an international, community-built bulwark against desertification. Borders are as old as human civilization, and focal points for today’s colliding forces of nationalism, climate change, globalization, and mass migration. The Edge of the Plain illuminates these lines of separation past and present, how we define them—and how they define us.

Wordsworth and the Poetics of Air

Wordsworth and the Poetics of Air PDF Author: Thomas H. Ford
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108424953
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Presents an ecocritical study of poetic atmosphere, a concept first developed through Romanticism, particularly in the poetry of William Wordsworth.

Ecocriticism and Asian American Literature

Ecocriticism and Asian American Literature PDF Author: Begoña Simal-González
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030356183
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
Ecocriticism and Asian American Literature: Gold Mountains, Weedflowers, and Murky Globes offers an ecocritical reinterpretation of Asian American literature. The book considers more than a century of Asian American writing, from Eaton’s Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912) to Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being (2013), through an ecocritical lens. The volume explores the most relevant landmarks in Asian American literature: the first-contact narratives written by Bulosan, Kingston, Mukherjee, and Jen; the controversial texts published by Sui Sin Far (Edith Eaton) at the time of the Yellow Peril; the rise of cultural nationalism in the 1970s and 1980s, illustrated by Wong’s Homebase and Kingston’s China Men; old and recent examples of “internment literature” dealing with the incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII (Sone, Houston, Miyake, Kadohata); and the new trends in Asian American literature since the 1990s, exemplified by Yamashita’s and Ozeki’s novels, which explore the challenges of our transnational, transnatural era. Begoña Simal-González’s ecocritical readings of these texts provide crucial interdisciplinary insights, addressing and analyzing important narratives within Asian American culture and literature.

Amorous Aethetics

Amorous Aethetics PDF Author: Seth T. Reno
Publisher:
ISBN: 1786940833
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Amorous Aesthetics traces the development of intellectual love from its first major expression in Baruch Spinoza's Ethics, through its adoption and adaptation in eighteenth-century moral and natural philosophy, to its emergence as a Romantic tradition in the work of six major poets.