Climate and the Making of Worlds develops a materialist ecocriticism, tracking the imprint of the planetary across a long history of poetic rewritings and critical readings in which what is at stake is the climate as a condition of human world making. It offers a geohistorical interpretation of the shifts associated with three phases in the history of English poetry: baroque allegory, Augustan description, and romantic lyric. Modal change indexes key stages in the epochal transition as Britain developed from an agrarian society, embedded in the climate system and subject to its shocks, to an i ... More

Climate and the Making of Worlds develops a materialist ecocriticism, tracking the imprint of the planetary across a long history of poetic rewritings and critical readings in which what is at stake is the climate as a condition of human world making. It offers a geohistorical interpretation of the shifts associated with three phases in the history of English poetry: baroque allegory, Augustan description, and romantic lyric. Modal change indexes key stages in the epochal transition as Britain developed from an agrarian society, embedded in the climate system and subject to its shocks, to an industrial-imperial state that had begun to decouple from the concrete space-time of the Earth system. The central archive is English poetry written between Milton’s Paradise Lost and Smith’s "Beachy Head." Incorporating new sciences into ancient literary genres, these ambitious poems aspired to encompass what Thomson in The Seasons calls the “system . . . entire.” Even as they take from Lucretius’s De rerum natura an attention to nature’s limits, however, these poems also develop strategies for disavowing planetary vicissitude: in eschatological expectation, in projects of improvement and expansion, and in the personal solace found in untouched nature. Literary criticism recapitulates such disavowal when it fails to recognize the climatic real that provokes these fantasies of transcendence. This book argues that the “social”—the symbolic categories with which we know ourselves, our labor, and our world, as well the institutions and infrastructures that organize the reproduction of life—is constitutively open to the planetary.