Early Anthropocene Literature in Britain, 1750–1884

This book questions when exactly the Anthropocene began, uncovering an “early Anthropocene” in the literature, art, and science of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. In chapters organized around the classical elements of Earth, Fire, Water, and Air, Seth Reno shows how literary writers of the Industrial Era borrowed from scientists to capture the changes they witnessed to weather, climate, and other systems. Poets linked the hellish flames of industrial furnaces to the magnificent, geophysical force of volcanic explosions. Novelists and painters depicted cloud formations and polluted urban atmospheres as part of the emerging discipline of climate science. In so doing, the subjects of Reno’s study—some famous, some more obscure—gave form to a growing sense of humans as geophysical agents, capable of reshaping Earth itself. Situated at the interaction of literary studies, environmental studies, and science studies, Early Anthropocene Literature inBritain tells the story of how writers heralded, and wrestled with, Britain’s role in sparking the now-familiar “epoch of humans.”

“Charlotte Brontë at the Anthropocene is incredibly capacious. … Thinking with and alongside this book has already opened up galvanizing avenues of inquiry in my own research and teaching, as I am sure it will do for many others.” (Devin M. Garofalo, Victorian Studies, Vol. 65 (2), 2023) “This book not only invites us to rethink the ubiquitous term ‘Anthropocene,’ but also challenges familiar assumptions about environmentalist art. As Reno demonstrates, poets and painters sensed the ‘age of humans’ long before the emergence of modern ecology. Not only that, they realized that art could give form to environmental changes that elude everyday perception. Reno’s study reminds us that concerns about humans’ outsized influence on the planet are not new. At the same time, Early Anthropocene Literature in Britain also captures a unique historical moment—a time when climate change, mass extinction, and other dilemmas were only just emerging as crises. Reno’s study thus offers a vital perspective on our current predicament. Those new to the Anthropocene will discover a comprehensive introduction; experts will appreciate the surprising, provocative connections Reno draws among science, visual art, and literature.” (Lisa Ottum, Associate Professor of English, XavierUniversity, USA)

“In Early Anthropocene Literature in Britain, 1750–1884, Seth Reno offers a provocative and compelling argument to show that British writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were becoming fully aware of the damaging global impact of fossil-fueled industry upon the landscapes and life-sustaining ecosystems of the natural world. Grounded in the influential writings of geologists, geographers, and natural historians such as James Hutton, Charles Lyell, and Erasmus Darwin, this monograph elucidates the important work of imaginative writers, from Wordsworth and Shelley through Dickens and Ruskin, to synthesize and urgently communicate the real-world impacts of these transformative scientific discoveries. Reno convincingly demonstrates that our modern concept of the Anthropocene as a distinctively disastrous geological epoch is already clearly apparent in the work of these British writers. This book offers a bold, cross-disciplinary synthesis that will be of great interest and lasting value to literary scholars and historians of science.” (James C. McKusick, Professor of English, University of Missouri-Kansas City, USA, and author of Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology (2000) and co-editor of Literature and Nature: Four Centuries of Nature Writing (2001))

Seth T. Reno is Associate Professor of English at Auburn University Montgomery, USA. He is author of Amorous Aesthetics: Intellectual Love in Romantic Poetry and Poetics, 1788–1853 (2019), editor of Romanticism and Affect Studies (2018), and co-editor of Wordsworth and the Green Romantics: Affect and Ecology in the Nineteenth Century (2016).