Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times (AnthropoScene)

Tobias Menely is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Davis, and the author of The Animal Claim: Sensibility and the Creaturely Voice.Jesse Oak Taylor is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Washington in Seattle and the author of The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf.

Few terms have garnered more recent attention in the sciences, humanities, and public sphere than the Anthropocene, the proposed epoch in which a human “signature” appears in the lithostratigraphic record. They explore the longstanding dialogue between imaginative literature and the earth sciences and show how scientists, novelists, and poets represent intersections of geological and human timescales, the deep past and a posthuman future, political exigency and the carbon cycle.Accessibly written and representing a range of methodological perspectives, the essays in this volume consider what it means to read literary history in the Anthropocene.Contributors include Juliana Chow, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Thomas H.

Ranging as it does from the crowded present into deep time, where the most immediate and personal of human stories intermesh with planetary narrative, Anthropocene Reading is a deeply thought-provoking volume.”—Jan A. Zalasiewicz, author of The Goldilocks Planet: The Four Billion Year Story of Earth’s Climate“An ambitious and exhilarating collection. It takes the Anthropocene debates well beyond their familiar terrain. Sullivan, Trinity University. “A rich collection of essays, their span befitting the scale and diversity of an Earth bein