American Anthropocene Sublimes

The environmental memoir has become a culturally prominent literary form and provides an ideal site for investigating the shifting destinies of the concept of the sublime in the context of ecological crises and the Anthropocene. This book explores the affordances and limits of the sublime as a means of representing environmental crises and human–nonhuman relationships in contemporary American memoirs. More specifically, it examines what it terms contemporary U.S. ecobiographical memoirs, showing how they reconfigure the traditional sublime by deploying and reshaping it to depict mountains and mountaineering, hunting, agriculture, atomic power, and oil extraction. In doing so, it engages with a broad range of affects—not only the sublime but also the eerie and the ‘stuplime’—as well as ecological categories such as the haptic and toxic sublime, making a theoretically ambitious intervention in contemporary debates on literature and environmental crisis.