Peter Adkins – författare

The first half of the twentieth century was a period of accelerated resource extraction, industrial intensification and tipping points in pollution levels, hastening the emergence of an epoch in which humans are the key drivers of planetary change. Virginia Woolf and the Anthropocene situates Woolf's oeuvre as an important body of work within the literary history of our new planetary period, showing how her fiction and non-fiction engages with questions around climate change, environmental politics, imperial extractivism, eco-philosophy, species difference, natural history and extinction. Bringing together leading and emergent scholars, this collection recognises Woolf as a writer who was profoundly influenced by ecological and environmental questions throughout her life. It brings to light how Woolf responded to the environmental changes of her time and illuminates how her literary innovations continue to offer compelling ways of imagining the nonhuman and the planetary in our present moment.

The first half of the twentieth century was a period of accelerated resource extraction, industrial intensification and tipping points in pollution levels, hastening the emergence of an epoch in which humans are the key drivers of planetary change. Virginia Woolf and the Anthropocene situates Woolf's oeuvre as an important body of work within the literary history of our new planetary period, showing how her fiction and non-fiction engages with questions around climate change, environmental politics, imperial extractivism, eco-philosophy, species difference, natural history and extinction. Bringing together leading and emergent scholars, this collection recognises Woolf as a writer who was profoundly influenced by ecological and environmental questions throughout her life. It brings to light how Woolf responded to the environmental changes of her time and illuminates how her literary innovations continue to offer compelling ways of imagining the nonhuman and the planetary in our present moment.

The Modernist Anthropocene examines how modernist writers forged new and innovative ways of responding to rapidly changing planetary conditions and emergent ideas about nonhuman life, environmental change and the human species. Drawing on ecocritical analysis, posthumanist theory, archival research and environmental history, this book resituates key works of modernist fiction within the ecological moment of the early twentieth century, a period in which new configurations of the relationship between human life and the natural world were migrating between the sciences, philosophy and literary culture. The author makes the case that the early twentieth century is pivotal in our understanding of the Anthropocene both as a planetary epoch and a critical concept. In doing so, he positions James Joyce, Djuna Barnes and Virginia Woolf as theorists of the modernist Anthropocene, showing how their oeuvres are shaped by, and actively respond to, changing ideas about the nonhuman that continue to reverberate today. Peter Adkins is the author of a wide range of articles and book chapters on modernism, Victorian literature, animal studies, ecocriticism and posthumanism.

The Modernist Anthropocene examines how modernist writers forged new and innovative ways of responding to rapidly changing planetary conditions and emergent ideas about nonhuman life, environmental change and the human species. Drawing on ecocritical analysis, posthumanist theory, archival research and environmental history, this book resituates key works of modernist fiction within the ecological moment of the early twentieth century, a period in which new configurations of the relationship between human life and the natural world were migrating between the sciences, philosophy and literary culture. The author makes the case that the early twentieth century is pivotal in our understanding of the Anthropocene both as a planetary epoch and a critical concept. In doing so, he positions James Joyce, Djuna Barnes and Virginia Woolf as theorists of the modernist Anthropocene, showing how their oeuvres are shaped by, and actively respond to, changing ideas about the nonhuman that continue to reverberate today.