Early Anthropocene Literature in Britain, 1750–1884 by Seth T. Reno, and: Charlotte Brontë at the Anthropocene by Shawna Ross (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Early Anthropocene Literature in Britain, 1750–1884 by Seth T. Reno, and: Charlotte Brontë at the Anthropocene by Shawna Ross Devin M. Garofalo (bio) Early Anthropocene Literature in Britain, 1750–1884, by Seth T. Reno; pp. xvi + 246. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, $119.99, $119.99 paper. Charlotte Brontë at the Anthropocene, by Shawna Ross; pp. vii + 326. Albany: SUNY Press, 2020, $95.00, $24.95 paper. For scholars of nineteenth-century British literature and the environmental humanities, the Anthropocene concept poses a number of pressing challenges. Among them are preserving historical specificity while tracking transhistorical continuities, scaling between competing forms and forces (as well as levels of reading), and theorizing human species-being without obfuscating intrahuman difference and uneven landscapes of exposure. The two monographs reviewed here are organized around a common set of concerns: the relationship between anthropogenic enterprise and geologic process as emergent in the long nineteenth century, the affordances of aesthetic representation in confrontation with the so-called Anthropocene, and problems of literary history. Their scalar approaches, however, are quite different. Whereas Seth T. Reno's Early Anthropocene Literature in Britain, 1750–1884 cuts across more than a century's worth of aesthetic and scientific cultural production, Shawna Ross's Charlotte Brontë at the Anthropocene centers the oeuvre of one woman writing in a particular place and time. Considered together, these monographs throw into relief some of the possibilities and pitfalls of ecocritical nineteenth-century studies. Reno's Early Anthropocene Literature in Britain takes as its point of focus the "Romantic Century," the bookends of which are the onset of the Industrial Revolution and John Ruskin's 1884 storm-cloud lectures. Eschewing the bounds of periodization, [End Page 357] Reno emphasizes transhistorical porosity. He does so to "advocate for 1750 as a convenient starting date for the Anthropocene": it encompasses the rise of industry, agriculture, and commerce in "the global fossil fuel era"; marks "a clear rise in CO2"; and reveals how "the eighteenth century is the first time that writers recognized humanity as a geological force of nature" (4). Whereas, according to Reno, "most literary studies of the Anthropocene … argu[e] that recognition of anthropogenic climate change does not emerge until the twentieth century," Early Anthropocene Literature in Britain "proposes a novel framework built on the substrate of little-noticed" eighteenth- and nineteenth-century "acknowledgments of climate change" (7). In the project's expansive archive, Reno locates "a tension between humans as powerful geological agents and humans as insignificant in the vast immensity of deep time and deep space," a tension that he argues is constitutive of the Anthropocene (11). Taking shape across four chapters whose elemental structure (earth, fire, water, air) proceeds from Erasmus Darwin's The Botanic Garden (1791), Early Anthropocene Literature in Britain surveys a wide range of writings that self-consciously chronicle "the Industrial Revolution as the start of a new geological epoch" (47). Early Anthropocene Literature in Britain surveys an incredibly rich archive and observes numerous connections between anthropogenic enterprise and geophysical processes. But much of what the book claims as argumentatively or methodologically novel tends to echo existing scholarship. Some of this may come down to audience, for the readers addressed in Early Anthropocene Literature in Britain are presumed not to have followed recent developments in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ecostudies. If, however, it is indeed the case that "popular opinion" or the established scholarly "Grand Narrative" tends to locate self-conscious "recognition" of humankind's geophysical power in the twentieth century, as Reno claims, scholars in the fields of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century studies have been arguing otherwise for some time now (viii, 7). Despite briefly acknowledging the flatness of the Anthropocene concept and the trouble with claiming golden spikes—geohistorical markers around which contemporary debates about the origination of our new post-Holocene epoch are organized—the book nevertheless stakes out a self-admittedly "convenient" and (to scholars in the field) familiar one: 1750 (4). In the process, key historical, cultural, conceptual, and aesthetic distinctions tend to slip away. All texts become uniform instances of the "links" (a word the book leans on heavily) between geologic process and anthropogenic enterprise that...