Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2019, 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 investe (open full item for complete abstract)
Committee: Mary Jean Corbett (Committee Co-Chair); Madelyn Detloff (Committee Co-Chair); Erin Edwards (Committee Member); Andrew Hebard (Committee Member); Marguerite Shaffer (Committee Member)
Subjects: British and Irish Literature; Literature