Late Nineteenth-Century Adventure Fiction and the Anthropocene

ABSTRACT

This article traces the relationship of widespread human catastrophe in late nineteenth-century adventure fictions to the equally disaster-focused discourse of the Anthropocene. Encompassing an entire people, continent, or species, destruction in adventure fiction laid a foundation in the West for imagining the Anthropocene. Using the broad frames of history, knowledge, and identity, my project suggests that narrating death and devastation may actually come at cross-purposes with the activist positionality of contemporary scientists, humanists, and lobbyists who write about the Anthropocene.