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Groff Dissertation Final Draft 7-25.pdf (2.1 MB)

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Living with the Past: Science, Extinction, and the Literature of the Victorian and Modernist Anthropocene

Groff, Tyler Robert
http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4651-6910
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1564088076269053

Abstract Details

2019, Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, English.
My dissertation reads key works of Victorian and modernist literature by Alfred Tennyson, Elizabeth Gaskell, H. Rider Haggard, David Jones, T. S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf alongside contemporaneous scientific texts to illustrate how mass anthropogenic extinction became increasingly recognizable. By bridging periods, my dissertation examines the multiple and sometimes conflicting registers of meaning that extinction accrued throughout Britain’s industrial and imperial history as the notion of anthropogenic mass extinction gained traction within the cultural imaginary. Literary critics who discuss the Anthropocene within the context of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries tend to focus squarely on the question of climate, using the geohistorical moment of Britain’s industrialization to trace the ideological, material, and scientific developments that gave rise to the notion of anthropogenic climate change within the public imagination, especially through representations of pollution and compromised atmospheres. My project attempts to reframe this conversation by considering the extent to which the Anthropocene became increasingly knowable to both Victorians and modernists through biological registers: as in the observable impacts of imperialist processes and technological modernity on biodiversity and global animal populations. These impacts were recognized in, for example, African species and subspecies that became critically endangered or extinct due to British hunting culture as well as avian species that sharply declined due to British consumer practices. I argue that mid-nineteenth-century authors from Tennyson to Gaskell were beginning to explore the degree to which geological frameworks called into question long-standing beliefs regarding humankind’s placement within the natural world as well as the precarity of species within the context of deep time. I consider how such lines of inquiry continued throughout the century in adventure fiction invested in Britain’s imperial project, particularly the work of H. Rider Haggard, which illuminates the rhetorical techniques Britons used to excuse the extinctions produced through the excesses of British hunting culture. My dissertation traces this conceptual throughline within literary modernism to consider the ways that a sense of humankind’s geological force partially arose out of a clear decline in nonhuman life in a geologically-abridged span of time. The apocalypticism of authors such as David Jones, T.S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf positions both human and nonhuman populations as eventual co-casualties of technological modernity and draws upon the imagery of deep time to frame humankind as a geological agent. I argue that works of modernism engage with humankind’s increased capacity to erase species within geologically brief spans of time.
Mary Jean Corbett (Committee Co-Chair)
Madelyn Detloff (Committee Co-Chair)
Erin Edwards (Committee Member)
Andrew Hebard (Committee Member)
Marguerite Shaffer (Committee Member)
183 p.
British and Irish Literature; Literature
ecocriticism; critical animal studies; Victorian literature; modernist literature; Anthropocene; extinction; TS Eliot; Virginia Woolf; Rider Haggard; David Jones; Alfred Tennyson; Elizabeth Gaskell

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Groff, T. R. (2019). Living with the Past: Science, Extinction, and the Literature of the Victorian and Modernist Anthropocene [Doctoral dissertation, Miami University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1564088076269053

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Groff, Tyler. Living with the Past: Science, Extinction, and the Literature of the Victorian and Modernist Anthropocene. 2019. Miami University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1564088076269053.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Groff, Tyler. "Living with the Past: Science, Extinction, and the Literature of the Victorian and Modernist Anthropocene." Doctoral dissertation, Miami University, 2019. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1564088076269053

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

miami1564088076269053
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This open access ETD is published by Miami University and OhioLINK.