Modernism and the Anthropocene

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

• 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

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.