ABOUT THIS BOOK
In this book, Tobias Menely develops a materialist ecocriticism, tracking the imprint of the planetary across a long literary history of poetic rewritings and critical readings which continually engage with the climate as a condition of human world-making. Menely’s central archive is English poetry written between John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) and Charlotte Smith’s Beachy Head (1807)—a momentous century and a half during which Britain, emerging from a crisis intensified by the Little Ice Age, established the largest empire in world history and instigated the Industrial Revolution. Incorporating new sciences into ancient literary genres, these ambitious poems aspired to encompass what the eighteenth-century author James Thomson called the “system . . . entire.” Thus they offer a unique record of geohistory, Britain’s epochal transition from an agrarian society, buffeted by climate shocks, to a modern coal-powered nation. Climate and the Making of Worlds is a bracing and sophisticated contribution to ecocriticism, the energy humanities, and the cultural history of the Anthropocene.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Tobias Menely is associate professor of English at the University of California, Davis.  He is the author of The Animal Claim: Sensibility and the Creaturely Voice, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: Stratigraphic Criticism
Chapter 1. “Earth Trembled”: Paradise Lost, the Little Ice Age, and the Climate of Allegory
Chapter 2. “The Works of Nature”: Descriptive Poetry and the History of the Earth in Thomson’s The Seasons
Chapter 3. Mine, Factory, and Plantation: The Industrial Georgic and the Crisis of Description
Chapter 4. Uncertain Atmospheres: Romantic Lyricism in the Time of the Anthropocene
Afterword: The Literary Past and the Planetary Future
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliographic Note
Index