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Anthropocene Modernisms: Ecological Expressions of the "Human Age" in Eliot, Williams, Toomer, and Woolf

Taylor, Rebekah Ann
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1461270901

Abstract Details

2016, PHD, Kent State University, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of English.
This dissertation argues that transatlantic literary experimentation of the early twentieth century, often referred to as high modernism, expresses the emergent geological epoch defined by human impact, the Anthropocene. The historical moment that produced texts like The Waste Land, Spring and All, Cane, and The Waves becomes crucial to shifting ideas about the place of the human species in relationship to the physical world, if we attune to more inclusive conceptions of nature. High modernism actually makes profound contributions to conversations about the human relationship to the physical, nonhuman world, despite the fact that the fields of ecocriticism and modernist studies are too rarely brought into dialogue. Ultimately, modernity is an ecological phenomenon, and writers such as T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, William Carlos Williams, and Jean Toomer anticipate current conceptualizations of the Anthropocene in many ways—including characteristically modernist manipulations of scale, engagements with geological time, and meditations on the entanglement of humans and nonhumans. As they respond to the rapid transformation of the Earth’s surface and atmosphere, these authors unsettle inherited notions of nature as a passive construct entirely separate from the human. Instead, these texts perform the complexity of a world that is simultaneously intimate and strange, self and other. For the modernists, and in the Anthropocene, humans are equally distinct and interconnected, dominant and vulnerable, as the human species is revealed to be subjected to the very systems it put into action.
Kevin Floyd (Advisor)
Ryan Hediger (Advisor)
223 p.
Environmental Studies; Literature
ecocriticism; anthropocene; modernism; environmental studies; posthumanism; new materialism; American literature; British literature

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Taylor, R. A. (2016). Anthropocene Modernisms: Ecological Expressions of the "Human Age" in Eliot, Williams, Toomer, and Woolf [Doctoral dissertation, Kent State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1461270901

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Taylor, Rebekah. Anthropocene Modernisms: Ecological Expressions of the "Human Age" in Eliot, Williams, Toomer, and Woolf. 2016. Kent State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1461270901.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Taylor, Rebekah. "Anthropocene Modernisms: Ecological Expressions of the "Human Age" in Eliot, Williams, Toomer, and Woolf." Doctoral dissertation, Kent State University, 2016. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1461270901

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

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© 2016, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by Kent State University and OhioLINK.