Modernism and the Anthropocene explores twentieth-century literature as it engages with the non-human world across a range of contexts. From familiar modernist works by D.H. Lawrence and Hart Crane to still-emergent genres like comics and speculative fiction, this volume tackles a series of related questions regarding how best to understand humanity's increasing domination of the natural world.
Jon Hegglund is associate professor of English at Washington State University. John McIntyre is associate professor of English at the University of Prince Edward Island.
Introduction: Modernism and the Emergent Anthropocene Part I: Modernism-Anthropocene Encounters Chapter 1: Revolt against the Anthropos: The Human-Environment Conflicts in D.H. Lawrence Chapter 2: Vorticism in an Age of Climate Change Chapter 3: Hart Crane: A Poet of Our Climate Chapter 4: "What kind of creature uttered it...?": A Stratigraphy of Subjectivity in Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable Part II: Planetary Time and Space Chapter 5: "The Modernist Cosmos: Olaf Stapledon, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and the Crisis of Species Chapter 6: Modernist Planets and Planetary Modernism Chapter 7: Early Ecology and Climate Change in the Future Histories of H.G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon Chapter 8: Second Modernism and the Aesthetics of Temporal Scale Part III: Writing Materials Chapter 9: Comics: Art of the Anthropocene Chapter 10: Modernism on Ice: Marianne Moore and the Glacial Imagination Chapter 11: Modernism's Plastic Futures Chapter 12: Sky and Smoke: Literary Atmospherics in Cary and Ibuse
Within the growing field of ecocritical modernist studies, examining literary modernism's relationship to the Anthropocene is a particularly urgent task. By theorizing twentieth-century modernisms as literatures of an 'emergent Anthropocene,' this book opens an important conversation about the extent to which modernist aesthetic practices-from experimental novels and poetics to sci-fi, comics, and popular science writing-anticipate current concerns about the scale of human impact on the planet, the entanglement of human with more-than-human agencies, and the discrepancy between phenomenological, historical, and planetary timescales. Representing a range of critical perspectives, the chapters offer thought-provoking starting points for further investigation. -- Anne Raine, University of Ottawa This important volume spotlights modernist engagement with the nonhuman world. Scholars and students conscious of their unraveling natural setting and strained social context are focusing on just these tensions. Modernism and the Anthropocene succeeds by mingling the ecological turn in modernist studies with the cultural-historical experience of the Anthropocene. The result is a timely contribution for literary scholars, environmental humanists, and students of our unfolding climate emergency. -- Jeffrey Mathes McCarthy, University of Utah
