Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Crawford, Iain

Titel

Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion by Elizabeth Carolyn Miller (review)

Ist Teil von

• Dickens Quarterly, 2022-06, Vol.39 (2), p.222-226

Ort / Verlag

Oxford: Johns Hopkins University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2022

Quelle

Literature Online (LION)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Taking as her premise the conceptual deficit that has been created by the ways in which "our critical understanding of British literature has been inadequately attentive to the epistemology of extractivism" (17), she sets out to "reenter the exhaustive imaginary of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries" and thereby "understand its correspondences with our current environmental movement and … recognize how profoundly it has shaped our modes of understanding and representing the natural world" (198). For, even while Britain was leading the way towards a global economy founded upon technologies of extraction, it never lost "an ever-present sense that it was living on borrowed time" (9), and the anxieties associated with predictions of eventual resource depletion and exhaustion haunt its culture and literature just as they trouble our own times. Beginning with Nostromo, concluding with The Hobbit, and ranging from canonical classics such as The Mill on the Floss to works such as Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands and "Sultana's Dream" that have more recently become the focus of critical and pedagogical attention, the book makes its argument through accumulating examples of a larger pattern as opposed to offering longer readings of just a few texts. Chapter Three concludes the book's argument by focusing on energy through examining five examples of speculative fiction that "are set in extractive spaces or imagine a post-extractive society" and that are "imbued with [an] overarching sense of a disappearing underground stock."