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VICTORIAN ECOCRITICISM FOR THE ANTHROPOCENE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 August 2017

Daniel Williams
Daniel Williams*
Affiliation:
Harvard University
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Extract

How might literary and cultural spheres intersect with the Anthropocene, the epoch — however defined — of humanity's detectable influence at geological scale? What forms, genres, objects, and methodological lenses might prove most fertile in mediating between the concept's abstraction and its concrete entailments for literary and cultural history? Such questions have already commissioned a range of critical projects that attempt to reframe the Anthropocene itself: as a trope of science fiction, given how humans are “terraforming” the planet (Heise 215–20); as an object for media archaeology, considering the “signatures” that our aggregate actions are leaving in the physical strata of the earth (Boes and Marshall 64–67); and as a challenge to the categorical distinctions by which historical study is practiced, with its blurring of “human history” and “natural history” (Chakrabarty 201–07).

Type
Review Essay
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 45 , Issue 3 , September 2017 , pp. 667 - 684
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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