Climate and the Making of Worlds

Toward a Geohistorical Poetics

Climate and the Making of Worlds
Tobias Menely
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NZ$ 52.99
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NZ$ 42.39
Paperback
h229 x 152mm - 272pg
25 Jun 2021 US
International import eta 10-30 days
9780226776286
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In this book, Tobias Menely develops a materialist ecocriticism, tracking the imprint of the planetary across a long literary history of poetic rewritings and critical readings which continually engage with the climate as a condition of human world making. Menely' s central archive is English poetry written between John Milton' s Paradise Lost (1667) and Charlotte Smith' s "Beachy Head" (1807)-a momentous century and a half during which Britain, emerging from a crisis intensified by the Little Ice Age, established the largest empire in world history and instigated the Industrial Revolution. Incorporating new sciences into ancient literary genres, these ambitious poems aspired to encompass what the eighteenth-century author James Thomson called the "system . . . entire. " Thus they offer a unique record of geohistory, Britain' s epochal transition from an agrarian society, buffeted by climate shocks, to a modern coal-powered nation. Climate and the Making of Worlds is a bracing and sophisticated contribution to ecocriticism, the energy humanities, and the prehistory of the Anthropocene.
"Menely' s book addresses an extraordinarily taxing interpretive problem. How has the turbulence of the Earth itself intervened in the history of poetic form? His answer is revelatory. With erudition, subtlety, and literary eclat, Menely sets out a geohistorical criticism whereby poetry from Milton to the Romantics is rendered new. Climate and the Making of Worlds will have a profound and immediate influence on environmental criticism of the long eighteenth century. All subsequent scholarship in the field will have to reckon with its radiant insights. " * Jeremy Davies, University of Leeds * "Climate and the Making of Worlds is a bracing, fully-realized example of what it means to reconceptualize literary history-and indeed, critical theory-in terms that finally avow the Earth as the active condition of every form of cultural production. Menely illuminates the power of verse to disclose its dependency upon the energetic vicissitudes of a planet that both enables and exceeds human economic and imaginative ends. As careful as it is courageous, Climate and the Making of Worlds will constitute an indispensable treatise on method for materialist ecocriticism and the energy humanities for years to come. " * Amanda Jo Goldstein, University of California, Berkeley * "Climate and the Making of Worlds is a well-researched, cogently argued, and unusually perceptive analysis of the poetic transformations that registered an epochal rift: the shift in the eighteenth-century from an advanced organic economy based on solar energy to an energy economy dependent on fossil fuels. Drawing on a wide range of scholarship in economics, ecological thought, the history of science, and ecocriticism, Menely brilliantly explores how the transformation of Britain' s energy economy shaped georgic and locodescriptive verse from John Milton to Charlotte Smith. " * Robert Markley, University of Illinois *
Tobias Menely is professor of English at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of The Animal Claim: Sensibility and the Creaturely Voice, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

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