Introduction: Anthropocene Fictions at the Scale of a Lifetime -- Chapter 1: Bog Burst at the Dawn of the Anthropocene: Observing the Moors under Crisis -- Chapter 2: Three Days on the Moors with Jane Eyre: Defining Anthropos -- Chapter 3: Shirley's Tale of Valley, Factory, and Lioness: Gathering Multispecies Romances of Ecological Degradation -- Chapter 4: Provisional Survivors in Postnatural Villette: Learning to Love the Storm -- Conclusion: Climates for Mourning, Editing, and Scholarship.
Summary:
"Charlotte Brontë at the Anthropocene argues that Brontë was an attentive witness of the Anthropocene and created one of the first literary ecosystems animated by human-caused environmental change. Living in rural, industrializing Yorkshire in the early- and mid-nineteenth century, Brontë was squarely placed, both in time and space, at the inauguration of this new geological era, identified by contemporary climatologists as the successor to the Holocene. As the rapidly escalating consequences of a globalizing Industrial Revolution rendered human action the most powerful force shaping the Earth, Brontë combined her personal experiences, scientific knowledge, and narrative skills to document environmental change in her representations of moorlands, valleys, villages, and towns, and the processes that disrupted them, including extinction, deforestation, industrialization, and urbanization. In her novels, Brontë layers visions of ecological change at multiple timeframes-from the macrocosmic scale of geological deep time to the microcosmic scale of a single ecological crisis-to tell stories about the Anthropocene at the scale of a human lifetime. Close reading of Brontë's fiction and juxtaposing it with Victorian and contemporary science writing, as well as with the writings of her family members, reveal the importance of storytelling for understanding how human behaviors contribute to environmental instability and why we resist changing our destructive habits. Ultimately, Brontë's lifelong engagement with the nonhuman world offers five powerful axioms for surviving ecological crises and thriving under unpropitious conditions: to witness destruction carefully, to write about it unflinchingly, to apply those experiences by questioning and redefining toxic definitions of the human, and to mourn the dead, all without forgetting to tend the living"-- Provided by publisher.
Series:
SUNY series, studies in the long nineteenth century
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.