The Modernist Anthropocene (2022)
Shortlisted for the 2022 British Society for Literature and Science Book Prize
“Thanks to The Modernist Anthropocene, the early twentieth century can no longer be mistaken for a time of unselfconscious acceleration and extraction. Peter Adkins shows us how modernist novels published in those decades were incubating posthumanist thought and theorising the Anthropocene even before the word’s first use in 1922. Essential.”
Professor Paul K. Saint-Amour, University of Pennsylvania
“The Modernist Anthropocene is a sweeping and exciting monograph, surely one of the most sophisticated of the recent crop of ecocritical studies of modernism. It will be indispensable for students and scholars in this field.”
Dr Caroline Hovanec, University of Tampa
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.
Published in Edinburgh University Press’s Critical Studies in Modernist Cultures series.
Thanks to funding from the University of Edinburgh, the book is open access and can be downloaded for free here: https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/pub/media/ebooks/9781474481984.pdf
Reviewed in:
Modernism/modernity
The Review of English Studies
The Year’s Work in English Studies
Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism
