Short description:

Wild Anthropocene demonstrates how literature illuminates progressive solutions to Anthropocene challenges. It will be a useful addition to theoretical discussions on the Anthropocene for scholars, researchers and students in the environmental humanities, literary studies, ecocriticism and environmental philosophy.

Long description:

Wild Anthropocene examines four key areas?the politics of deep time, neoliberalism's socio-ecological impacts, global population growth and inter-species entanglement?to demonstrate how literature illuminates progressive solutions to Anthropocene challenges. The book argues that technological mitigation of contemporary environmental crises must be complimented by a politics committed to multispecies justice. Central to this new politics is the project of reimagining our relationship with time as something other than its status within capitalist praxis.

The book brings together poetry and fiction written by a diverse range of writers to demonstrate how contemporary literature addresses important connections between social oppression and environmental issues. It also critiques techno-managerial visions of the future that celebrate humanity's ever-growing "control" over ecosystems by examining multiple sources of wildness (temporal, environmental and technological) that expose the problematic ideology underwriting such aspirations. Readers will be introduced to a way of understanding the Anthropocene that, while being informed by recent discoveries in earth science and evolutionary biology, also makes a strong case for humanities-based understanding of environmental politics.

This interdisciplinary text will be a useful addition to theoretical discussions on the Anthropocene for scholars, researchers and students in the environmental humanities, literary studies, ecocriticism and environmental philosophy.

"Economides's Wild Anthropocene engages deep time with brilliance, nuance, and attention to detail. Her lucid analyses of both environmental poetry and fiction persuasively demonstrate the power of literature in rethinking the human and positioning different human communities in relation to geological time, biodiversity loss, and climate change. A fascinating read for anyone interested in the role of literature in its engagement with the global eco-crises of the Anthropocene."

Ursula K. Heise, Distinguished Professor, Department of English/Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, University of California, Los Angeles, USA

?The Anthropocene is a dangerous concept: in shattering traditional conceptions of the human, it also puts familiar understandings of political agency at stake. In her wide-ranging readings of texts by authors as different as Margaret Atwood, Dionne Brand, Robinson Jeffers, and Jeff Vandermeer, Louise Economides shows how literature's engagement with deep time can energize a politics of social and ecological justice for this moment of peril. Deeply insightful and elegantly written, her book is an invaluable contribution to ongoing debates about the Anthropocene in the environmental humanities.?

Hannes Bergthaller, National Taiwan Normal University

"This incisive ecocritical study explores deep time imaginaries in recent North American poetry and fiction. Economides shows how literary refractions of evolutionary and geological timescales can illuminate the stakes of political struggle and the horizons of justice in the Anthropocene." 

Tobias Menely, University of California, Davis, USA

?Countering ?ecomodernist optimism?s? obliviousness to its racist and sexist histories and to the ongoing experiences of global environmental injustice, Louise Economides?s Wild Anthropocene: Literature and Multispecies Justice in Deep Time offers readers a powerful alternative with her embrace of the strange, perhaps even partially artificial, wildness rampant in the Anthropocene. She avoids both the flat ontology attributing full agency to all forces of earthly ecologies and the corporate-friendly belief that Anthropocene engineers can control the massively shifting ecologies of Earth. Instead, Wild Anthropocene traces literature?s contributions to shock, critique, and trace emergences of promising human and non-human networks.? 

Heather I. Sullivan, Professor of German and Comparative Literature, Trinity University, USA

Table of Contents:

Introduction: Towards a Wild Anthropocene: Imagining Multispecies Justice in Deep Time  1. Robinson Jeffers, Deep Time and the Geological Sublime  2. Angular Unconformities: Environmental Justice in the Poetry of Don McKay and Dionne Brand  3. Imagining Extinction in Deep Time  4. Reproductive Rights in the Context of Deep Time  5. Viral Capitalism, Tangled Trees and the Future of Biodiversity