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1st Edition

The Anthropocene Sublime in Literature Immanence and Entanglement from Romanticism to Digitality

By Thomas Storey Copyright 2027

256 Pages

by Routledge

Description

One starting point for the Anthropocene – in which human industry has so profoundly altered the planet’s geosphere – is the invention of the steam engine in the late eighteenth century, a date roughly contemporaneous with the emergence of Romanticism. Focusing on the Romantic concept of the sublime – a figure for a failure of representation or comprehension – this work of literary criticism... Read more

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

1 – Introduction: Anthropocene Antinomies

Crisis Overload

Sublime Prehistory

Figuring Antinomy

2 – Impossible Totalities: Sublime Modalities of the Romantic Anthropocene

Terminal Excess

Romantic Sublimities

Material Mountains

The Romantic Anthropocene

Environmental Exteriorization

Mapping Technologies

From Romanticism to Digitality

3 – ‘Blank Naught-At-All’: Coleridge, Kafka, and the Failures of Transcendence

Representation’s Limits

Mechanico-Corpuscular Philosophy

Alienated Transcendence

The Sublime Castle

Technological Otherness

4 – Sublime Abjection: Reconciling Hybridity in Frankenstein and the Xenogenesis Trilogy

Encountering Alterity

Scientific Monstrosity

Parodying the Sublime

Cyborg Xenogenesis

Countering Essentialism

Sublime Assemblages

5 – Ecological Assemblages: The Mediation of Nature in Wordsworth and Powers

Environmental Rifts

Object Relations

Media Ecologies

Vegetal Networks

Tree Technology

Posthuman Limits

6 – “An Emergency of the Spectacular”: Digital Ecologies and the Crisis of the Sublime in Jorie Graham’s Ecopoetry

Anthropocene Entanglement(s)

Nature’s Technicization

Mapping the Anthropocene Sublime

Post-Sublime Poetics

7 – Conclusion: Assessing the Anthropocene Sublime

Bibliography

Index

Author(s)

Biography

Thomas Storey is an early career academic specializing in the environmental humanities, climate representation, ecopoetics and literary studies.

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