The Anthropocene Sublime in Literature

Immanence and Entanglement from Romanticism to Digitality

Thomas Storey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2026
• Print ISBN:
  9781041207115
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781040806470
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

One starting point for the Anthropocene – in which human industry has so profoundly altered the planet's geosphere – is the invention of the steam engine in the late eighteenth century, a date roughly contemporaneous with the emergence of Romanticism. Focusing on the Romantic concept of the sublime – a figure for a failure of representation or comprehension – this work of literary criticism unpacks that historical conjuncture and traces its implications forward to the present moment of environmental crisis and digital mediation. Reading Romantic texts alongside more recent works drawn from modernism, sci-fi, cli-fi, and ecopoetics, and pinpointing their parallel evocations of entanglement, immanence, hybridity, and ecological thinking, The Anthropocene Sublime in Literature shows how Romantic ideas about nature have shaped contemporary debates about ecology and, more surprisingly, conceptions of technology, which are revealed to be embedded in Romantic thought and entangled with our perceptions of the natural world.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Anthropocene Antinomies
• 2 Impossible Totalities: Sublime Modalities of the Romantic Anthropocene
• 3 “Blank Naught-At-All”: Coleridge, Kafka, and the Failures of Transcendence
• 4 Sublime Abjection: Reconciling Hybridity in Frankenstein and the Xenogenesis Trilogy
• 5 Ecological Assemblages: The Mediation of Nature in Wordsworth and Powers
• 6 “An Emergency of the Spectacular”: Digital Ecologies and the Crisis of the Sublime in Jorie Graham’s Ecopoetry
• 7 Conclusion: Assessing the Anthropocene Sublime
• Bibliography
• Index