Day

March 13, 2024

BRITISH MODERNISM AND THE ANTHROPOCENE: EXPERIMENTS WITH TIME

Ponce de Leon Alejandro

By David Shackleton. Oxford University Press, 2023.

This book assesses the environmental politics of modernism in relation to the idea of the Anthropocene—a proposed geological epoch in which humans have fundamentally changed the Earth System. The early twentieth century was marked by environmental transformations that were so complex and happened on such great scales that they defied representation. Modernist novelists responded with a range of innovative narrative forms that started to make environmental crisis on a planetary scale visible. Paradoxically, however, it ...