Bringing together work from twelve leading scholars in the field of ecocriticism, Modernism and the Anthropocene explores the diverse ways that early twentieth-century literature initiated far-reaching conversations about the material and non-human world.

Modernism and the Anthropocene explores twentieth-century literature as it engages with the non-human world across a range of contexts. From familiar modernist works by D.H. Lawrence and Hart Crane to still-emergent genres like comics and speculative fiction, this volume tackles a series of related questions regarding how best to understand humanity’s increasing domination of the natural world.

Introduction: Modernism and the Emergent Anthropocene

Part I: Modernism-Anthropocene Encounters

Chapter 1: Revolt against the Anthropos: The Human-Environment Conflicts in D.H. Lawrence

Chapter 2: Vorticism in an Age of Climate Change

Chapter 3: Hart Crane: A Poet of Our Climate

Chapter 4: “What kind of creature uttered it…?”: A Stratigraphy of Subjectivity in Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable

Part II: Planetary Time and Space

Chapter 5: “The Modernist Cosmos: Olaf Stapledon, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and the Crisis of Species

Chapter 6: Modernist Planets and Planetary Modernism

Chapter 7: Early Ecology and Climate Change in the Future Histories of H.G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon

Chapter 8: Second Modernism and the Aesthetics of Temporal Scale

Part III: Writing Materials

Chapter 9: Comics: Art of the Anthropocene

Chapter 10: Modernism on Ice: Marianne Moore and the Glacial Imagination

Chapter 11: Modernism’s Plastic Futures

Chapter 12: Sky and Smoke: Literary Atmospherics in Cary and Ibuse