Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, "Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion" (Princeton UP, 2021)

episode

New Books in Environmental Studies not yet transcribed

▲ 0

Transcript

This episode hasn't been transcribed yet Upvotes decide what gets transcribed next — 0 so far. Sign in to upvote

More from New Books in Environmental Studies

Veronica House, "Local Organic: Food Rhetorics and Community Writing for Impact" (Utah State UP, 2025) 52 min · 20 Dec 2025

All episodes from New Books in Environmental Studies →

Report any issue

Source

Recorded15 Oct 2021

Publisherfeeds.megaphone.fm

Handlerec:5383348

Show notes

The 1830s to the 1930s saw the rise of large-scale industrial mining in the British imperial world. Elizabeth Carolyn Miller examines how literature of this era reckoned with a new vision of civilization where humans are dependent on finite, nonrenewable stores of earthly resources, and traces how the threatening horizon of resource exhaustion worked its way into narrative form. Britain was the first nation to transition to industry based on fossil fuels, which put its novelists and writers in the remarkable position of mediating the emergence of extraction-based life. Miller looks at works like Hard Times, The Mill on the Floss, and Sons and Lovers, showing how the provincial realist novel's longstanding reliance on marriage and inheritance plots transforms against the backdrop of exhaustion to withhold the promise of reproductive futurity. She explores how adventure stories like Treasure Island and Heart of Darkness reorient fictional space toward the resource frontier. And she shows how utopian and fantasy works like "Sultana's Dream," The Time Machine, and The Hobbit offer imaginative ways of envisioning energy beyond extractivism. Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion (Princeton UP, 2021) reveals how an era marked by violent mineral resource rushes gave rise to literary forms and genres that extend extractivism as a mode of environmental understanding. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Ask this episode

“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.