Charlotte Brontë at the Anthropocene (Suny Series, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century)

Forges a fresh interpretation of Charlotte Brontë's oeuvre as a response to ecological instability. "Charlotte Brontë at the Anthropocene argues that Brontë was an attentive witness of the Anthropocene and created one of the first literary ecosystems animated by human-caused environmental change. Living in rural, industrializing Yorkshire in the early- and mid-nineteenth century, Brontë was squarely placed, both in time and space, at the inauguration of this new geological era, identified by contemporary climatologists as the successor to the Holocene. As the rapidly escalating consequences of a globalizing Industrial Revolution rendered human action the most powerful force shaping the Earth, Brontë combined her personal experiences, scientific knowledge, and narrative skills to document environmental change in her representations of moorlands, valleys, villages, and towns, and the processes that disrupted them, including extinction, deforestation, industrialization, and urbanization. In her novels, Brontë layers visions of ecological change at multiple timeframes-from the macrocosmic scale of geological deep time to the microcosmic scale of a single ecological crisis-to tell stories about the Anthropocene at the scale of a human lifetime. Close reading of Brontë's fiction and juxtaposing it with Victorian and contemporary science writing, as well as with the writings of her family members, reveal the importance of storytelling for understanding how human behaviors contribute to environmental instability and why we resist changing our destructive habits. Ultimately, Brontë's lifelong engagement with the nonhuman world offers five powerful axioms for surviving ecological crises and thriving under unpropitious conditions: to witness destruction carefully, to write about it unflinchingly, to apply those experiences by questioning and redefining toxic definitions of the human, and to mourn the dead, all without forgetting to tend the living"-- Provided by publisher Honorable Mention, 2020 Sonya Rudikoff Award presented by the Northeast Victorian Studies AssociationIn this book, Shawna Ross argues that Charlotte Brontë was an attentive witness of the Anthropocene and created one of the first literary ecosystems animated by human-caused environmental change. Brontë combined her personal experiences, scientific knowledge, and narrative skills to document environmental change in her representations of moorlands, valleys, villages, and towns, and the processes that disrupted them, including extinction, deforestation, industrialization, and urbanization. Juxtaposing close readings of Brontë's fiction with Victorian and contemporary science writing, as well as with the writings of Brontë's family members, Ross reveals the importance of storytelling for understanding how human behaviors contribute to environmental instability and why we resist changing our destructive habits. Ultimately, Brontë's lifelong engagement with the nonhuman world offers five powerful strategies for coping with ecological crises: to witness destruction carefully, to write about it unflinchingly, to apply those experiences by questioning and redefining toxic definitions of the human, and to mourn the dead, all without forgetting to tend the living.