Climate and the Making of Worlds: Toward a Geohistorical Poetics

Abstract

This is a historicist study of Anthropocene poetics that is striking for its breadth (not just a century and a half of British blank-verse poetry from John Milton to Charlotte Smith, but a context that includes global economic and ecological systems of imperial expansion and climatic upheaval) and depth (a critical method that accounts for influences on composition and reception at once). Tobias Menely’s subject is what he calls ‘the climatological uncon-scious’ (35), the profound impact that meteorological and related physical phenomena have on the human condition, an impact that our myths of free will and self-volition, that our ideas of history as untouched by nature, have repressed; we pretend at ‘a social internality that can be conceptualised as independent of the Earth system’ (13). In advancing this, Menely is revising no less authoritative a critic than Fredric Jameson, finding that the hidden subject of historical metacommentary is not just the free market’s manipulations of human labour but the physical conditions that underwrite these. This