Anticipatory Environmental (Hi)Stories from Antiquity to the Anthropocene

Christopher Schliephake, Evi Zemanek

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Year: 2023
• eBook ISBN: 9781978789586
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: Literature

Anticipatory Environmental (Hi)Stories from Antiquity to the Anthropocene studies the interplay of environmental perception and the way societies throughout history have imagined the future state of "nature" and the environments in which coming generations would live. What sorts of knowledge were and are involved in outlining future environments? What kinds of texts and narrative strategies were and are developed and modified over time? How did and do scenarios and narratives of the past shape (hi)stories of the future? This book answers these questions from a diachronic as well as a cross-cultural perspective. By looking at a diverse range of historical evidence that transcends stereotypical utopian and dystopian visions and allows for nuanced insights beyond the dichotomous reservoir of pastoral motifs and apocalyptic narratives, the contributors illustrate the multifaceted character of environmental anticipation across the ages.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Dialogues Between Times and Places
• Experience and Expectations: Hesiod on Work, Justice, and Environment
• Ancient Geographies of Health and Environmental Acumen
• The Past is a Foreign Environment
• Future Imperfect in Edmund Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender (1579)
• Retrospective Prophecy in Contemporary Maya Literature
• Extinction and Conservation
• Feeling Like a Species
• Anticipating Multispecies Thinking in Plutarch’s Animal Treatises
• William Temple Hornaday’s Haunting Vision of a Wildlife Apocalypse
• Anticipating Extinction
• Narrating Civilizational Collapse in the Anthropocene
• Urban Environments
• Sensing Noise, Sensing Space
• The Arcologies of Paolo Soleri
• Utopia’s User Interface
• Climate(s) and Materialities
• Solastalgia, Future Memory, and Polluted Landscapes in Lucan’s Bellum Civile 7
• Nuclear Winter
• “Nature in Order” or Human Agency? Visions of the Future in the Long Nineteenth-Century Newspaper
• Explaining Climate Change and Predicting its Impacts
• Ecology in a Loop
• Index
• About the Contributors