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Climate and the Making of Worlds : Toward a Geohistorical Poetics
Author
Title
Climate and the Making of Worlds : Toward a Geohistorical Poetics / Tobias Menely.
ISBN
9780226776316
Publication
Chicago : University of Chicago Press, [2021]
Copyright Notice Date
©2021
Physical Description
1 online resource (272 p.) : 2 halftones
Local Notes
Access is available to the Yale community.
Notes
In English.
Access and use
Access restricted by licensing agreement.
Summary
In this book, Tobias Menely develops a materialist ecocriticism, tracking the imprint of the planetary across a long literary history of poetic rewritings and critical readings which continually engage with the climate as a condition of human world making. Menely's central archive is English poetry written between John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) and Charlotte Smith's "Beachy Head" (1807)-a momentous century and a half during which Britain, emerging from a crisis intensified by the Little Ice Age, established the largest empire in world history and instigated the Industrial Revolution. Incorporating new sciences into ancient literary genres, these ambitious poems aspired to encompass what the eighteenth-century author James Thomson called the "system . . . entire." Thus they offer a unique record of geohistory, Britain's epochal transition from an agrarian society, buffeted by climate shocks, to a modern coal-powered nation. Climate and the Making of Worlds is a bracing and sophisticated contribution to ecocriticism, the energy humanities, and the prehistory of the Anthropocene.
Variant and related titles
De Gruyter University Press eBook pilot project 2021.
Format
Books / Online
Language
English
Added to Catalog
April 19, 2022
Contents
Frontmatter
contents
Introduction: Stratigraphic Criticism
1. "Earth Trembled": Paradise Lost, the Little Ice Age, and the Climate of Allegory
2. "The Works of Nature": Descriptive Poetry and the History of the Earth in Thomson's The Seasons
3. Mine, Factory, and Plantation: The Industrial Georgic and the Crisis of Description
4. Uncertain Atmospheres: Romantic Lyricism in the Time of the Anthropocene
Afterword: The Literary Past and the Planetary Future
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliographic Note
Index
Subjects
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