Climate and the Making of Worlds

Toward a Geohistorical Poetics

Tobias Menely

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780226776286
  9780226776149
• eBook ISBN:
  9780226776316
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: Literature

Winner of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts Michelle Kendrick Memorial Book Prize and the Center for Robert Penn Warren Studies Warren-Brooks Award. 

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• 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