Eighteenth-Century Environmental Humanities

JEREMY CHOW is an assistant professor of English at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. His scholarship explores the relationships among eighteenth-century literature and culture, the environmental humanities, and gender and sexuality studies.

“A welcome teaching tool for the undergraduate course in eighteenth-century studies-if you want to integrate environmental studies into your class but don’t know where to begin, start here.” - Lucinda Cole (author of Imperfect Creatures: Vermin, Literature, and the Sciences of Life, 1600-1740) “A field-defining collection, Eighteenth-Century Environmental Humanities demonstrates how the emergent methodologies of the environmental humanities illuminate and are in turn enriched by the study of eighteenth-century history and cultural production.” - Peter Remien (author of The Concept of Nature in Early Modern English Literature) "This innovative collection brilliantly addresses the challenge of studying and teaching the eighteenth century from an Anthropocene vantage. The wide-ranging essays explore the meaning of environmental justice for eighteenth-century writers reckoning with the socio-ecological violence of transatlantic empire." - Tobias Menely (author of Climate and the Making of Worlds: Toward a Geohistorical Poetics) “A provocative and compelling case for centering the eighteenth century within environmental humanities. This interdisciplinary collection of essays will be of great interest and lasting value to literary scholars and teachers, and it will serve as a touchstone for all future work at the intersections of eighteenth-century studies and the environmental humanities.” - Seth Reno (editor of The Anthropocene: Approaches and Contexts for Literature and the Humanities) “Bringing together eleven tightly argued essays in a cohesive, innovative, and approachable volume, Eighteenth-Century Environmental Humanities embodies the deeply generative possibilities of envisioning how the fields of eighteenth-century studies and the environmental humanities can mutually inform, enrich, and interrogate each other.” (Eighteenth-Century Fiction)

• List of IllustrationsIntroduction: Eighteenth Century + Environmental HumanitiesJeremy ChowPart I: Eighteenth Century + Climate ChangeChapter 1: Towards a Genealogy of Geoengineering: Erasmus Darwin and the Little Ice AgeElliot Patsoura                                                                                                                                                     Chapter 2: Storm ApostropheAnnette Hulbert                                                                                             Chapter 3: “When Stormy Winds Happen”: Divine Providence, Climate Change Discourse, and the Cause of Weather DisastersAdam W. SweetingPart II: Eighteenth Century + New Materialisms                                                      Chapter 4: Phillis Wheatley Peters’ Niobean SoundscapesShelby Johnson                                  Chapter 5: Syphilis and Natural History: The Ethical Limits of Human MasteryMariah Crilley                                                                       Part III: Eighteenth Century + Blue HumanitiesChapter 6: Shore/Lines: Drawing Environmental Change on Eighteenth-Century Prince Edward Island                                                                       Claire Campbell                                                                                Chapter 7: Of Water, Wind, and Storms: The Elemental Regimes of the Buccaneer JournalJason PaytonPart IV: Eighteenth Century + Indigeneity and DecolonialityChapter 8: “Supporting Sinking Nations”: John Dennis’s Indigenous Women and their DisastersMatt DuquÈsChapter 9: Imagining Decolonial Futures in William Gilbert’s The HurricaneAmi YoonPart V: Eighteenth Century + Green UtopiasChapter 10: Slavery and Plantation Stewardship: The Eighteenth-Century Caribbean Georgics of James Grainger and Philip FreneauChristopher Allan BlackChapter 11: John Thelwell and L.M. Montgomery Write the Green CityKate ScarthAcknowledgmentsBibliographyNotes on ContributorsIndex