Climate and the Making of Worlds

"For the humanities, climate change is a problem of historical understanding that requires new scales of context, including that of planetary processes. In this book, Tobias Menely shows that poetry is a rich and revealing archive of geohistorical change. Poetry and the kind of human world-making that it exemplifies can best be understood, Menely argues, through their interconnections with a dynamic Earth System. Menely focuses on English poetry of the 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. These poems depict seasonal and climatic extremes, unpredictable weather, and the cycles of wind and water as inescapable conditions of production and limits to growth. Menely shows that geohistorical transition is expressed not only topically but also in changing literary modes, and that the poetry of this period--from Milton's "Paradise Lost" forward--reflects a recognition of planetary crisis. The result is a bracing and sophisticated contribution to ecological poetics and to the cultural history of the Anthropocene"--