British Romanticism Climate Change And The Anthropocene

This book is the first major ecocritical study of the relationship between British Romanticism and climate change. It analyses a wide range of texts – by authors including Lord Byron, William Cobbett, Sir Stamford Raffles, Mary Shelley, and Percy Shelley – in relation to the global crisis produced by the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815. By connecting these texts to current debates in the environmental humanities, it reveals the value of a historicized approach to the Anthropocene. British Romanticism, Climate Change, and the Anthropocene examines how Romantic texts affirm the human capacity to shape and make sense of a world with which we are profoundly entangled and at the same time represent our humiliation by powerful elemental forces that we do not fully comprehend. It will appeal not only to scholars of British Romanticism, but to anyone interested in the relationship between culture and climate change.

In the Romantic period, women writers developed specific aesthetics and writing strategies in their engagements with climate change and climate catastrophe. Anya Heise-von der Lippe draws on intersectional feminist and ecocritical approaches to highlight gender as a complicating category in Romantic engagements with these topics. She addresses the ways in which gendered critical framings continue to resonate in current Anthropocene discourses that use Romantic conceptualizations of »Nature«, impacting contemporary approaches to the relationship between humans and non-humans in the ongoing climate catastrophe.

This book seeks to uncover how today’s ideas about climate and catastrophe have been formed by the thinking of Romantic poets, novelists and scientists, and how these same ideas might once more be harnessed to assist us in the new climate challenges facing us in the present. The global climate disaster following Mt Tambora’s eruption in 1815 – the ‘Year without a Summer’ – is a starting point from which to reconsider both how the Romantics responded to the changing climates of their day, and to think about how these climatic events shaped the development of Romanticism itself. As the contributions to this volume demonstrate, climate is an inescapable aspect of Romantic writing and thinking. Ideologies and experiences of climate inform everything from scientific writing to lyric poetry and novels. The ‘Diodati circle’ that assembled in Geneva in 1816 – Lord Byron, Percy and Mary Shelley, John Polidori and John Cam Hobhouse and the gothic novelist MG ‘Monk’ Lewis – is synonymous with the literature of that dreary, uncanny season. Essays in this collection also consider the work of Jane Austen, John Keats and William Wordsworth, along with less well-known figures such as the scientist Luke Howard, and later responses to Romantic climates by John Ruskin and Virginia Woolf.

Written by a leading geographer of climate, this book offers a unique guide to students and general readers alike for making sense of this profound, far-reaching, and contested idea. It presents climate change as an idea with a past, a present, and a future. In ten carefully crafted chapters, Climate Change offers a synoptic and inter-disciplinary understanding of the idea of climate change from its varied historical and cultural origins; to its construction more recently through scientific endeavour; to the multiple ways in which political, social, and cultural movements in today’s world seek to make sense of and act upon it; to the possible futures of climate, however it may be governed and imagined. The central claim of the book is that the full breadth and power of the idea of climate change can only be grasped from a vantage point that embraces the social sciences, humanities, and natural sciences. This vantage point is what the book offers, written from the perspective of a geographer whose career work on climate change has drawn across the full range of academic disciplines. The book highlights the work of leading geographers in relation to climate change; examples, illustrations, and case study boxes are drawn from different cultures around the world, and questions are posed for use in class discussions. The book is written as a student text, suitable for disciplinary and inter-disciplinary undergraduate and graduate courses that embrace climate change from within social science and humanities disciplines. Science students studying climate change on inter-disciplinary programmes will also benefit from reading it, as too will the general reader looking for a fresh and distinctive account of climate change.

Postcolonial Literatures of Climate Change investigates the evolving nature of postcolonial literatures and criticism in response to the global, regional, and local environmental transformations brought about by anthropogenic climate change.

The Oxford Handbook of British Romantic Prose is a full-length essay collection devoted entirely to British Romantic nonfiction prose. Organized into eight parts, each containing between five and nine chapters arranged alphabetically, the Handbook weaves together familiar and unfamiliar texts, events, and authors, and invites readers to draw comparisons, reimagine connections and disconnections, and confront frequently stark contradictions, within British Romantic nonfiction prose, but also in its relationship to British Romanticism more generally, and to the literary practices and cultural contexts of other periods and countries. The Handbook builds on previous scholarship in the field, considers emerging trends and evolving methodologies, and suggests future areas of study. Throughout the emphasis is on lucid expression rather than gnomic declaration, and on chapters that offer, not a dutiful survey, but evaluative assessments that keep an eye on the bigger picture yet also dwell meaningfully on specific paradoxes and the most telling examples. Taken as a whole the volume demonstrates the energy, originality, and diversity at the crux of British Romantic nonfiction prose. It vigorously challenges the traditional construction of the British Romantic movement as focused too exclusively on the accomplishments of its poets, and it reveals the many ways in which scholars of the period are steadily broadening out and opening up delineations of British Romanticism in order to encompass and thoroughly evaluate the achievements of its nonfiction prose writers.

From catastrophe to utopia, the most comprehensive survey yet of how literature can speak to the 'Anthropocene'.

This book outlines the development and perspectives of the Anthropocene concept by Paul J. Crutzen and his colleagues from its inception to its implications for the sciences, humanities, society and politics. The main text consists primarily of articles from peer-reviewed scientific journals and other scholarly sources. It comprises selected articles on the Anthropocene published by Paul J. Crutzen and a selection of related articles, mostly but not exclusively by colleagues with whom he collaborated closely. • In the year 2000 Nobel Laureate Paul J. Crutzen proposed the Anthropocene concept as a new epoch in Earth’s history • Comprehensive collection of articles on the Anthropocene by Paul J. Crutzen and his colleagues• Unique primary research literature and Crutzen’s comprehensive bibliography• Paul Crutzen’s scientific investigations into human influences on atmospheric chemistry and physics, the climate and the Earth system, leading to the conception of the Anthropocene• Reflections on the Anthropocene and its implications• Bibliometric review of the spread of the use of the Anthropocene concept in the Natural and Social Sciences, Humanities and Law