Charlotte Brontë at the Anthropocene

Shawna Ross is Assistant Professor of English at Texas A&M University. She is the author and editor of several books, including Humans at Work in the Digital Age: Forms of Digital Textual Labor.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Anthropocene Fictions at the Scale of a Lifetime1. Bog Burst at the Dawn of the Anthropocene: Observing the Moors under Crisis2. Three Days on the Moors with Jane Eyre: Defining Anthropos3. Shirley's Tale of Valley, Factory, and Lioness: Gathering Multispecies Romances of Ecological Degradation4. Provisional Survivors in Postnatural Villette: Learning to Love the StormConclusion: Climates for Mourning, Editing, and ScholarshipNotesWorks CitedIndex

"Charlotte Brontë at the Anthropocene is a worthy addition to the growing collection of critical thought on environmental disaster in nineteenth-century studies." — Studies in English Literature"In Charlotte Brontë at the Anthropocene attentive analyses of form and exquisite close readings abound." — Victorian Studies"For scholars of Brontë and nineteenth-century literature, the text offers a new way of viewing Brontë's novels and is especially strong at trying to navigate some of the thorny complexities of more problematic texts like Shirley. More broadly, it also serves as an excellent introduction to the concept of the Anthropocene, explains its connection to scholars in the humanities, and creates a clear argument for connecting literary studies (especially those focused in the nineteenth century) to the ways we can understand, grieve, protect and preserve our precious Earth in this new 'age of humans.'" — ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment"In the tour de force history of the burst and its aftermath that occupies the first chapter of Charlotte Brontë at the Anthropocene, Ross finds in the event all the crucial elements that shape her monograph's argument more generally … Like her equally powerful conclusion, which traces the presence of the humble native flower, the bluebell, through writing and editing by the Brontë family to examine the devastations of human loss, Ross's accomplished interdisciplinarity in this first chapter shows all the strengths of the author's approach to studying the Anthropocene as a literary critic." — Journal of British Studies"Ross's book is a demanding read even for advanced scholars, but it is worth the effort … Highly recommended." — CHOICE"Brontë's protagonists are canaries in the coal mine of the Anthropocene, barometers whose experiences register multiple temporal scales of anthropogenic change, from the murky depths of geological deep time to the prehistoric processes by which humans began to reshape their environments permanently, including their degradation of forested uplands to produce the moors the Brontë family are all known for depicting. This book is a tour-de-force, a deeply theoretical exploration of the Brontës'—especially Charlotte's—fiction in relation to concepts from deep time to ghost forests to the ecology of bogs." — Deborah Denenholz Morse, coeditor of A Companion to the Brontës