Current trends in Humanities/Masters’ Academy 13.12.2023 g.15:00

The environmental history of the early twentieth century can be characterised by tipping points and threshold moments: a spike in the development and use of liquid fuels; the nascence of motor and air travel; technological advancements in mineral extraction; the spread of human-made fertilisers; species extinction; the terra-forming capacities of modern warfare. The same period was also witness to threshold moments within literature and the arts, as writers and artists radically transformed what and how cultural works might function in the world, often responding – directly or indirectly – to the broader environmental transformations taking place around them. This talk will outline how these two lines of development – environmental and aesthetic – were imbricated in producing what can be now seen as the Modernist Anthropocene, a discrete moment in both environmental and cultural history. My talk will suggest that in the same way that the earth’s strata produces a record of previous geological ages, literary history can be approached as a kind of cultural-material index of planetary change. Focusing in particular on the writing of Virginia Woolf, whose essay ‘How Should One Read A Book?’ influences both the title and my approach to this talk, I will suggest we find a writer whose aesthetic experimentation and attunement to the changing planet offers not only a record of the Modernist Anthropocene but provocations about how we might read (and write) that speak to our present moment of climate crisis.

Peter Adkins is Early Career Teaching and Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of The Modernist Anthropocene: Nonhuman Life and Planetary Change in James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes (2022), editor of Virginia Woolf and the Anthropocene (2024) and co-editor of Virginia Woolf, Europe and Peace: Aesthetics and Theory (2020). He is co-editor of ‘Reading Braidotti, Reading Woolf’, a special issue of Comparative Critical Studies, as well as ‘Victorian Ecologies’, a special issue of 19. His writing has appeared in Textual Practice, The Modernist Review, Humanities, Green Letters, Glasgow Review of Books and Review 31, among other publications. He is a member of the Edinburgh Environmental Humanities Network and the Kent Animal Humanities Network, and is a co-founder of Digestive Modernisms.He is currently working on a project exploring the literary history of oil in Great Britain. A full list of publications can be found at www.peteradkins.net.