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. Menelygsquo;s central archive is English poetry written between John Miltonesquo;s Paradise Lost (1667) and Charlotte Smithtsquo;s sdquo;Beachy Headrdquo; (1807)gdash;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 ydquo;system . . . entire.tdquo; Thus they offer a unique record of geohistory, Britainosquo;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 prehistory of the Anthropocene.
