Title Climate and the making of worlds : toward a geohistorical poetics / Tobias Menely

Published Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, [2021] ©2021

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Description 1 online resource (278 pages) Contents Frontmatter -- 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 Summary 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 Notes Description based upon print version of record Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index Subject Climate and civilization -- Great Britain Climatic changes in literature. Ecology in literature. English poetry -- 17th century -- History and criticism English poetry -- 18th century -- History and criticism Human ecology in literature. Seasons in literature. English poetry -- Early modern, 1500-1700 -- History and criticism LITERARY CRITICISM / General. Climate and civilization Climatic changes in literature Ecology in literature English poetry Human ecology in literature Seasons in literature Great Britain Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc. Form Electronic book LC no. 2021004016 ISBN 022677631X 9780226776316

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