Modernism and the Anthropocene

Jon Hegglund is associate professor of English at Washington State University.John McIntyre is associate professor of English at the University of Prince Edward Island.

Within the growing field of ecocritical modernist studies, examining literary modernism’s relationship to the Anthropocene is a particularly urgent task. By theorizing twentieth-century modernisms as literatures of an ‘emergent Anthropocene,’ this book opens an important conversation about the extent to which modernist aesthetic practices—from experimental novels and poetics to sci-fi, comics, and popular science writing—anticipate current concerns about the scale of human impact on the planet, the entanglement of human with more-than-human agencies, and the discrepancy between phenomenological, historical, and planetary timescales. Representing a range of critical perspectives, the chapters offer thought-provoking starting points for further investigation.

• Introduction: Modernism and the Emergent AnthropocenePart I: Modernism-Anthropocene EncountersChapter 1: Revolt against the Anthropos: The Human-Environment Conflicts in D.H. Lawrence Chapter 2: Vorticism in an Age of Climate ChangeChapter 3: Hart Crane: A Poet of Our ClimateChapter 4: “What kind of creature uttered it…?”: A Stratigraphy of Subjectivity in Samuel Beckett’s The UnnamablePart II: Planetary Time and SpaceChapter 5: “The Modernist Cosmos: Olaf Stapledon, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and the Crisis of SpeciesChapter 6: Modernist Planets and Planetary ModernismChapter 7: Early Ecology and Climate Change in the Future Histories of H.G. Wells and Olaf StapledonChapter 8: Second Modernism and the Aesthetics of Temporal ScalePart III: Writing MaterialsChapter 9: Comics: Art of the AnthropoceneChapter 10: Modernism on Ice: Marianne Moore and the Glacial ImaginationChapter 11: Modernism’s Plastic FuturesChapter 12: Sky and Smoke: Literary Atmospherics in Cary and Ibuse