Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-lnqnp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T14:52:35.388Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“The Present Obfuscation”: Cowper's Task and the Time of Climate Change

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Tobias Menely
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Climate change, I argue, is a catastrophe that resists the revelation promised by apocalyptic narrative. My case study is William Cowper's poem The Task (1785), which I situate in two climatic contexts: the year of its composition, which saw meteorological extremes caused by the eruption of an Icelandic volcano, and an era of geologic modernity, the Anthropocene, which commenced with the industrial combustion of fossil fuels in the late eighteenth century. As volcanogenic haze migrates in Cowper's descriptions from the countryside to the greenhouse and the imperial city, the poet fails to identify a meteorology with which to distinguish nature's seasonal “revolvency” from eschatological presages or from the modernization process itself—the historical “revolution” embodied by worsening urban pollution. Climate change poses a crisis, in the dual etymological senses of a decision and a turning point, because it unsettles the duration of the present, what returns and endures and so measures alteration.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 127 , Issue 3 , May 2012 , pp. 477 - 492
Copyright
Copyright © 2012 by The Modern Language Association of America

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Austen, Jane. Mansfield Park. Ed. Johnson, Claudia. New York: Norton, 1998. Print.Google Scholar
Baucom, Ian. Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History. Durham: Duke UP, 2005. Print.Google Scholar
Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Cambridge: Belknap, 2002. Print.Google Scholar
Benjamin, Walter. “Central Park.” Benjamin, Selected Writings 4:161–99.Google Scholar
Benjamin, Walter. “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” Benjamin, Selected Writings 4:313–55.Google Scholar
Benjamin, Walter. “On the Concept of History.” Benjamin, Selected Writings 4:389–400.Google Scholar
Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings. Ed. Jennings, Michael W. 4 vols. Cambridge: Belknap, 2004–06. Print.Google Scholar
Benjamin, Walter. “The Storyteller: Observations on the Works of Nikolai Leskov.” Benjamin, Selected Writings 3:143–66.Google Scholar
Burke, Edmund III. “The Big Story: Human History, Energy Regimes, and the Environment.” The Environment and World History. Ed. Burke, and Pomeranz, Kenneth. Berkeley: U of California P, 2009. 33–49. Print.Google Scholar
Chakrabarty, Dipesh!. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35.2 (2009): 197–222. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cowper, William. The Letters and Prose Writings. Vol. 2. Ed. James King and Charles Ryskamp. Oxford: Clarendon, 1981. Print.Google Scholar
Cowper, William. The Task. The Task and Selected Other Poems. Ed. Sambrook, James. London: Longman, 1994. 55–228. Print.Google Scholar
Crutzen, Paul. “Geology of Mankind.” Nature 415.6867 (2002): 23. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Darwin, Erasmus. The Botanic Garden. London, 1790. Print.Google Scholar
Favret, Mary. War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2010. Print.Google Scholar
Franklin, Benjamin. “Meteorology.” The Works of Benjamin Franklin. Vol. 3. Philadelphia, 1809. 287–89. Print.Google Scholar
Golinski, Jan. British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2007. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goodman, Kevis. Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008. Print.Google Scholar
Grattan, John, and Brayshay, Mark. “An Amazing and Portentous Summer: Environmental and Social Responses in Britain to the 1783 Eruption of an Iceland Volcano.” Geographical Journal 161.2 (1995): 125–34. Print.Google Scholar
Hansen, James. Storms of My Grandchildren. New York: Bloomsbury, 2009. Print.Google Scholar
Holy Bible. New York: Oxford UP, 1952. Print. Authorized King James Vers.Google Scholar
“IPCC Fourth Assessment Report: Climate Change 2007.” IPCC: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, n.d. Web. 7 Apr. 2012.Google Scholar
Jameson, Fredric. “The End of Temporality.” Critical Inquiry 29.4 (2003): 695–718. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Janković, Vladimir. Reading the Skies: A Cultural History of English Weather, 1660–1820. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2001. Print.Google Scholar
Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. New York: Oxford UP, 1967. Print.Google Scholar
Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Porter, Catherine. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993. Print.Google Scholar
Lynch, Deidre Shauna. “‘Young Ladies Are Delicate Plants’: Jane Austen and Greenhouse Romanticism.” ELH 77.3 (2010): 689–729. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marder, Elissa. Dead Time: Temporal Disorders in the Wake of Modernity. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002. Print.Google Scholar
McKibben, Bill. The End of Nature. New York: Anchor, 1999. Print.Google Scholar
Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2011. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Peterfreund, Stuart. “‘Great Frost and … Some Very Hot Summers’: Strange Weather, the Last Letters, and the Last Days in Gilbert White's Natural History of Selborne.” Romantic Science: The Literary Forms of Natural History. Ed. Heringman, Noah. Albany: State U of New York P, 2003. 85–110. Print.Google Scholar
Priestman, Martin. Cowper's Task: Structure and Influence. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983. Print.Google Scholar
“Public's Priorities for 2010.” The Pew Research Center for People and the Press. Pew Research Center, 25 Jan. 2010. Web. 24 Mar. 2011.Google Scholar
Reed, Arden. Romantic Weather: The Climates of Coleridge and Baudelaire. Hanover: Brown UP, 1983. Print.Google Scholar
Serres, Michel. Genesis. Trans. James, Geneviève and Nielson, James. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Serres, Michel. “Turner Translates Carnot.” Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy. Ed. Harari, Josué and Bell, David. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982. 54–62. Print.Google Scholar
“The Summer of Acid Rain.” The Economist. Economist Newspaper, 19 Dec. 2007. Web. 24 Mar. 2011.Google Scholar
Virgil. The Georgics. The Works of Virgil. Trans. John Dryden. London, 1697. 91–201. Print.Google Scholar
Walpole, Horace. The Letters of Horace Walpole. Vol. 8. Oxford: Clarendon, 1905. Print.Google Scholar
Wapner, Paul. Living through the End of Nature: The Future of American Environmentalism. Cambridge: MIT P, 2010. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
White, Gilbert. The Natural History of Selborne. 1789. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993. Print.Google Scholar
Witham, C. S., and Oppenheimer, C. “Mortality in England during the 1783–4 Laki Craters Eruption.” Bulletin of Volcanology 67.1 (2005): 15–26. Print.Google Scholar
Wood, Gillen D'Arcy. “Constable, Clouds, Climate Change.” Wordsworth Circle 38.1–2 (2007): 25–34. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar