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Late Nineteenth-Century Adventure Fiction and the Anthropocene
- Configurations
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 27, Number 3, Summer 2019
- pp. 271-300
- 10.1353/con.2019.0017
- Article
- Additional Information
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.