Eighteenth-Century Environmental Humanities

INTRODUCTION

Eighteenth Century + Environmental Humanities

JEREMY CHOW

AS THE FIRST COLLECTION DEDICATED to the nexus of eighteenth-century studies and the environmental humanities, Eighteenth-Century Environmental Humanities strives to accomplish three goals:

1. To identify and further develop how the environmental humanities, as a series of methodologies and an interdisciplinary genre of scholarship, is germane to eighteenth-century studies

2. To realize and showcase how eighteenth-century studies enriches the environmental humanities, and vice versa

3. To magnify the enfolded nature of scholarship and pedagogy, and thus demonstrate how eighteenth-century environmental humanities develops from the co-constitutions of research and teaching

The eleven essays that follow uphold all three of these goals with an intention to invigorate conversation, scholarly engagement, and interdisciplinary teaching. The eighteenth century of Eighteenth-Century Environmental Humanities is not a monolith; it is as an extensive period that incorporates the Restoration, the Enlightenment, and Romanticism. This expansive purview demonstrates how both environmental humanist and eighteenth-century discourses bleed through, into, and beyond the otherwise assumed-finite boundaries of periodicity. Like those who may approach this collection as a scholarly, pedagogical, or general interest text, the authors included here have come to this interdisciplinary blending from different avenues, approaches, and schools of thought. For some, the commitment to eighteenth-century studies and the recurrent visibility of environmental concerns has opened pathways to the environmental humanities. Others here seek to remedy the opacity of eighteenth-century studies in environmental humanities publications, conferences, and professional opportunities. Collectively, though, we seek to open up realms of the environmental humanities that speak to and grow from eighteenth-century studies. We approach this intersection as teacher-scholars invested in enriching undergraduate and graduate instruction, and thus paving inroads for educational change and emerging, collaborative humanities scholarship.

This collection of essays reveals investments in the fields of environmental history, literary studies, art history, cultural studies, critical race studies, Indigenous and native studies, postcolonialism and decoloniality, performance studies, and feminist and queer theories. Yet even with these multivocal explorations, the essays found here make available only eleven visualizations of eighteenth-century environmental humanities, of which there are assuredly myriad others. There are infinite possibilities by which to imagine the intersection of eighteenth-century studies and the environmental humanities, and our work here sets out to invite other collaborative and interdisciplinary work. In this way, as collections such as Vin Nardizzi and Tiffany Jo Werth’s Premodern Ecologies in the Modern Literary Imagination and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s Prismatic Ecologies have likewise advocated, we call on our colleagues, readers, and students to approach this collection as a starting point.¹ To motivate such a call, this introduction establishes the provenance of a burgeoning and brilliant eighteenth-century environmental humanities by, first, framing axioms by which to understand and thus demystify the environmental humanities and, second, unveiling this field’s imbrication within eighteenth-century studies, which this collection animates.

DEFINING THE ENVIRONMENTAL HUMANITIES IN FOUR AXIOMS

Despite its various perspectives and applications, this collection might putatively appear to identify a singular definition of what constitutes eighteenth-century environmental humanities. Let us be clear: no such discrete definition will be proffered here. Such a distillation would, in fact, work against what we strive to accomplish. By way of defining the environmental humanities then, we propose four axioms that introduce conceptual frameworks taken up by the subsequent chapters.

Axiom 1: The environmental humanities is not a monolith. It goes by many names and feels.

This first axiom bears repeating. In rejecting reduction, this collection avers that the environmental humanities is not one thing, despite our awareness that job calls and calls for papers employ the term as a seemingly homogeneous buzzword. Ursula Heise, to this point, acknowledges that the environmental humanities is not so much novel in its foundations or approaches as it is in its repurposing and recollection of humanistic perspectives, methods, and objects of study.² The environmental humanities, then, constitutes a provocative reshuffling of disciplinary fields, methodologies, and purviews with the goal of re-visioning what results in reorganization.

Indeed, definitions of the environmental humanities reflect varying commitments, disciplines, and social and political investments. As Serpil Opperman and Serenella Iovino contend, research in the environmental humanities is motivated by urgent environmental problems that stretch from the geological to the biological [and] are also essentially social and cultural issues deeply interwoven with economic and political agendas and thus demand solutions on many dimensions.³ Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert identify ecocriticism and ecotheory by these same tokens. Whereas ecocriticism is a lively confluence of ecology, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, literature, feminism, sustainability studies, environmental justice (especially within indigenous and postcolonial studies), and queer theory, ecotheory ranges across the environmental humanities, green studies, social activism, and the new materialisms with the goal of better grappling with the worlds brought about by anthropogenic climate change.⁴ As Cohen and Duckert evidence, terms like the environmental humanities, ecotheory, ecocriticism, and their epistemological kin are often used interchangeably. The term environmental humanities is preferred here because we as authors understand it as a legible invitation to scholarly and pedagogical colloquy that spans and encompasses various humanities disciplines, with a particular eye to interdisciplinary inquiry best characterized by the term humanistic—a loaded concept I unpack below. The definitions and applications we offer then are not exhaustive, but rather, visions of possibility for the present and future of this field.

Axiom 2: The environmental humanities approaches crisis; it is not exclusively tasked with remedying crisis.

These visions of possibility are perpetually under threat from the rhetoric of crisis. In many ways, Eighteenth-Century Environmental Humanities approaches the ominous crisis in the humanities, a scare tactic bedeviling institutions of higher education across the globe, especially in the United States, to which I speak directly. Fear of the crisis in the humanities remains a hysteria-inducing phobia (thus the scare quotes) that, under the threat of austerity and anti-intellectual measures, requires humanities scholars to prove why their work matters—to the department, the university, the field, and ways of living in the contemporary moment. Such a repeated question assumes work in other fields is always already self-explanatory, valid, and universally justifiable. This alarm-raising rhetoric—following the financial crisis of 2008, which has reared its ugly head again at the start of the 2020s (especially in the intra-pandemic setting in which we write this)—seems to default to the fallacious logic that arts and humanities majors are less prepared for assuming real-world careers after graduation. In this regard, a January 2021 op-ed piece woefully conjectures that the United States is home to too many individuals with doctorates, especially in the humanities. The author, an assistant professor of finance, argues that doctorate-granting institutions in the humanities need to reel this output in, for in the contracting job market lies a dejection that could very well feed into anarchist wet dreams of overthrow[ing] institutions of society.⁵ But where there is a surplus in the humanities, there is a dearth in STEM. The author’s solution? A government bailout that further invigorates STEM research and (further) slashes the humanities at the knees. The logical fallacies modeled by this rubbish argument exclusively uphold capitalist regimes of fiscal success wherein social good is implicit, which is allegedly captured by the phrase, a good job. As Benjamin Schmidt counters, this misguided logic occludes the fact that, in our present moment, some humanities may be demonstrating more usefulness than ever to students who seek to better understand culture from outside the dominant perspective and thus avail the ethos of a humanities-driven education, which seeks to invigorate a philosophy for life.⁶

In fall 2019, the Chronicle of Higher Education tackled the crisis head-on with an insert of fourteen essays, titled Endgame: Can Literary Studies Survive? The essays spotlighted literary studies, but the conversations and reactions begat by the collection reverberate throughout the arts and humanities. One of the fourteen, The New Humanities, by Jeffrey J. Williams, outlines a series of new, innovative fields, which include digital humanities, medical humanities, public humanities, and environmental humanities, that have the potential to save the humanities. The environmental humanities, Williams notes, is the most socially concerned effort, which draw[s] especially on the life sciences, but also on disciplines like geology, economics, and engineering, [and] looks at the human aspects of environmental issues—particularly climate change.⁷ While Williams sees these new humanities as a remodeling of the university, he warns against the co-optation of the humanities by other fields, which, in his perspective and that of his interviewee, postcolonial environmental humanist Rob Nixon, may very well reify the neoliberalism of the university. These are accurate and timely concerns; the fear of co-optation is real, especially within the mechanized, powerhouse business the university has become.

The crisis in the humanities instills one form of catastrophic thinking, while the visceral realities of anthropogenic climate change and environmental degradation, captured by the term the Anthropocene, broadens catastrophic thinking so as to reckon with another form: planetary calamity. Coined by ecologist Eugene Stoermer in the 1980s, the neologism, which translates to the age of humans, caught fire at the start of the new millennium and has since spurred a groundswell of scholarly inquiry, political activism, and environmental advocacy. Because of its juggernaut-like momentum (recognizable in conference themes, academic book series, calls for papers, and course offerings), the Anthropocene often accompanies definitions or iterations of the environmental humanities. In response, we offer a provocation: the environmental humanities is the most generative and interdisciplinary way of understanding the premises, complications, and effects of the Anthropocene. Consider Elizabeth DeLoughrey’s Allegories of the Anthropocene, which pinpoints the cottage industry of new journals and publications exploring the Anthropocene that privilege positivist methods and have little to say about the vitality of the arts and humanities.⁸ The environmental humanities center the arts and humanities with an eye to the pluralized and destructive/destructed worlds oriented by the Anthropocene.

And these approaches, for example by Stephanie LeMenager, Richard Grusin, Steve Mentz, Jussi Parikka, Anna Tsing, Charles Mann, and Kathryn Yusoff, rightly take to task the Anthropocene’s totalizing perspective of planet, place, and people.⁹ In other words, Anthropocene thinking too often teeters toward universalizing or homogeneity. If the Anthropocene is our age, then it’s worth vetting who and what are included by the plural first-person pronoun, especially in the realization that collective, universalizing rhetoric has historically reinforced the erasure of Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) and extends the insidious violence of (neo)colonialism, as Tony Birch and Kyle Powys White teach us.¹⁰ Although not all scholars and teachers who research the Anthropocene and its effects might identify as environmental humanists, both definitionally and methodologically, the Anthropocene serves as a striking model by which to understand the interdisciplinary and multimodal approaches that the environmental humanities pioneers.

What has remained mostly under the radar is the way in which the eighteenth century and the Anthropocene work in tandem. As a geological, climatological, sociological, anthropological, and environmental phenomenon, a deeper dive into frameworks for understanding the Anthropocene necessitates attention to eighteenth-century studies. Paul Crutzen, who popularized the term Anthropocene with Stoermer, locates the eighteenth century (specifically the 1784 patent for James Watts’s double-acting steam engine) as its planetary commencement, a usurpation of the Holocene (which is otherwise recognized as the current epoch, dating back from 11,500 years ago to the present). Popular focuses that accompany discussions of the Anthropocene include carbon dioxide saturation in the atmosphere, the melt of glacial caps (and the emissions trapped within), sea-level rise, extreme weather phenomena and temperatures, mass extinction, and the persistent needling that we have reached points of no return. The eschatology vibes emitted by much of Anthropocene writing are especially synced with the Industrial Revolution because, as Catherine Larrère has shown, throughout the eighteenth century, the terms catastrophe and revolution operated interchangeably.¹¹

A recent international working group on the Anthropocene has fingered the golden spike to 1950 and thus acknowledged that the rapid carbon emissions captured in the atmosphere can be backdated to the genesis of the Industrial Revolution, which scholars of the long eighteenth century admit within their purview.¹² J. R. McNeill observes that locating alternative golden spikes (of which there are now many) runs the risk of demoting the eighteenth century and thus refocusing historical attention elsewhere, which would reinforce other historical and cultural indices that ignore the eighteenth century’s (ironic and deleterious) import in conversations regarding climate fates and realities.¹³As contributors Elliot Patsoura, Annette Hulbert, and Adam Sweeting demonstrate, an eighteenth-century purview is germane to understanding the climactic exigencies—what Sweeting identifies as anxieties—we find ourselves ineluctably embracing now. These three authors ask, how might the writings of Erasmus Darwin, Phillis Wheatley Peters and Olaudah Equiano, and Increase Mather, respectively, allow us to situate growing eighteenth-century concerns over climate change? Indeed, the summer 2020 news curricular penned by former American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies president Jeffrey Ravel declares, in no uncertain terms, ASECS can no longer ignore its contributions to climate change.¹⁴

With that said, arguments surrounding the precision of originary dates (a sort of ill-gotten, finger-pointing primal scene) matter little to this collection not because these dates lack historical value, but because, in our opinion, they point toward the wrong question. We are not interested in whether the Anthropocene comes into its own in the eighteenth century or whether the eighteenth century nurses the Anthropocene’s formative years; rather, this collection responds to how eighteenth-century culture, literature, and art, examined through the lens of the environmental humanities, can respond to, understand, and approach the Anthropocene in its polyphonic effects.

Axiom 3: The environmental humanities requires and inspires collaboration.

On the heels of axiom 2, we want to tarry with these fears of crisis, first and foremost, in the environmental humanities’ purported indebtedness to the social and hard sciences, or the assertion that, in drawing on ecological standpoints (which are implicitly inscribed as scientific orientations), it is somehow derivative or deferential. To study the environment is not the singular responsibility of a specific school of thought, field of study, or mode of interpretation, especially if we remind ourselves that the Greek etomyn oikos, from which ecology emerges, refers to the household, the family, and the family’s property. Eighteenth-Century Environmental Humanities aspires to recognize a collective household of scholarly and pedagogical inclusivity. The authors here do not approach the environmental humanities as a means of ingratiating the humanities to the ascendency of STEM. The environmental humanities are not separable from the life sciences, and we wager that the life sciences are not isolable from the work of the humanities. Rather, our environmental humanities is one that highlights parity, cooperation, and reciprocity; we seek, in other words, a diverse, equitable, and inclusive environmental humanities, which is both a method for doing our work and also an acknowledgement of the topics we research that broach iniquities, power, and privilege—important concepts that can upheave the presumed innocence of objectivity.

Second, this collection questions the centrality of the human within the humanities, which, as feminist, queer, trans, disability, critical race, and Indigenous scholars remind us, can too often ossify and erase particular identities. We cannot, furthermore, forget our commitment to other environmental inter-actors and nonhuman kin, a concept that Agustín Fuentes and Natalie Porter recalibrate as central to evolving our relationship with the nonhuman in the environmental humanities, generally, and animal studies, specifically. "If kin are those closest to us in space, time, and flesh, they write, then kinship, by definition is a multispecies endeavor."¹⁵ Or as Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing puts it, We become who we are through multispecies aggregations.¹⁶ In looking to coconspirators and collaborators, we are also mindful of our multispecies and environmental interlocutors that invigorate our apprehensions of embodiment, inquiry, and knowledge.

With this regard, our collection nears what Greg Garrard, for example, has offered in the process of ecologizing humanity. Ecologizing stems from a recurrent endeavor to decenter the human from their previously unchallenged position as the focus of exclusive interest and analysis in the humanities.¹⁷ As Shelby Johnson and Mariah Crilley show in their contributions here, the premise of the human and its unstable boundaries are consistently under siege throughout eighteenth-century natural histories of virology, as Crilley shows, and in poetic representations of racialized maternity, as Johnson demonstrates. This process of ecologization, which disrupts definitions of the human, reveals an environmental humanities that de-hierarchizes what early moderns represented as the Great Chain of Being, or differences between and within species that have been politically, socially, and philosophically weaponized as artillery for oppression and supremacy. In its most democratizing form, to ecologize the environmental humanities is to witness forms of difference between human and nonhuman that do not necessitate subjugation, and instead visualize fecund planes of respected difference that energize critical inquiry. Lori Gruen has referred to a similar goal as entangled empathy, which proposes a new ontological ethic that centrally addresses human and nonhuman animal engagement. In Gruen’s powerful, utopian imaginary, empathic attunement can maintain discrete, nonconflated forms of subjectivity.¹⁸Astrida Neimanis, Cecilia Åsberg, and Johan Hedrén further invite us to consider what such an ethos might look like in the environmental humanities: Our task is thus the tricky one of acknowledging the differences and diffractions in worldviews, histories, subjectivities, relations and practices that various communities (both human and non-human) engage in, with respect to their environment, while also cultivating an environmental humanities that is well-placed to research and analyze these differences, and remain vigilant against the risk of epistemological monoculture.¹⁹

To avoid an epistemological monoculture, the spirit of the environmental humanities calls on collaboration that works to dismantle finite disciplinary silos. Following the environmental humanist synchronicity of poet Harriet Tarlo and artist Judith Tucker, our aspiration is that out of difference come connections bringing new imaginings to our audiences, imaginings that mirror our own discoveries made through collaborative cross-disciplinary practice.²⁰ We seek to uphold the environmental humanities, in this same mode, as a space that dwells in plurality, multiplicity, and heterogeneity. To do environmental humanities work is to do many things at once: it is to seek interdisciplinarity in its most utopian form; it is to acknowledge the humanities as multiplex, interrelational forms of being, learning, and reading; and it is to recognize environmental concerns, writ large, as those that require all the hands of the humanities on deck.

Axiom 4: The environmental humanities is anamorphic.

Recognizing that the environmental humanities is not a single thing, it is likewise important to remind ourselves that work in the environmental humanities does not presume a single vision. The environmental humanities play with anamorphic possibilities. Anamorphic illustrations (such as Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533) and Andrea Pozzo’s anamorphic dome (1690) painted on the ceiling of the Church of St. Ignazio) induce optical illusions, visual distortions, and newfound clarities based on one’s positionality. Anamorphosis plays with visual reliability, the limitations of imagined objectivity, and the constantly mobile ways of looking—all of which Donna Haraway addresses in her discussion of situated knowledges. Like Haraway, the authors here set out to visualize an account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subjects, a critical practice for recognizing our own ‘semiotic technologies’ for making meanings, and thus elucidate and open up new epistemological vantage points.²¹ The plurality of the environmental humanities—as field, method, and mode of inquiry—demands we come to terms with and likewise inhabit the unsteady and fluid ways of epistemological de/construction.

The anamorphosis of the environmental humanities similarly enfolds various genres and modes of interpretation. As axiom 1 detailed, the environmental humanities goes by many different alibis; it has many faces; its theories, conversations, and applications do not always commingle easily. What might be considered environmental humanities then? Consider, for example, ecocriticism, nature writing, literature and environment, naturalism, animism, ecospirituality, elemental thinking, new materialisms, plant and insect and animal studies, natural history and philosophy, environmental racism, ecofeminism and ecowomanism, queer ecologies, environmental justice, posthumanism, biosemiotics, environmental history, Indigenous futurisms, Afro-futurisms, and environmental arts and media and technologies, as only a handful. The environmental humanities as we understand it then functions as an interdisciplinary carrying bag that aspires to gather these diverse scholarly tactics—in tension and also together. We stand on all sides of the anamorphic environmental humanities so as to relish our own positionalities and seek insight from those who hold others.

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY + ENVIRONMENTAL HUMANITIES

But what does this mean for eighteenth-century studies, and why might scholars of our historical period take up the environmental humanities? Answering such a question demands we come to terms with a persistent epithet that surfaces in conversations about the eighteenth century: presentism. For many, the environmental humanities (because of its emergence in the past few decades) is the wellspring of the contemporary. Presentism, for those who do historical work, epitomizes the black spot of piratical lore. Take for example, Lynn Hunt’s 2002 address to the American Historical Association, titled Against Presentism. Presentism, Hunt synthesizes, reifies contemporary ways of understanding and interpretation and skews attention away from historical periods. Hunt’s bald concern is that it threatens to put us out of business as historians.²²

Putting the accuracy of this claim aside, we want to recognize first that, because of indictments like these, those of us pursuing the interdisciplinary manifestations of both eighteenth-century studies and environmental humanities have too often realized a double bind. Conversations with contributors have revealed an unsettling trend within the publication and professionalizing side of these fields. If eighteenth-century gatekeepers disavow the environmental humanist work because it falls into the (bad?) trap of presentism, environmental humanities gatekeepers do not make space for eighteenth-century studies precisely because it is not presentist enough. David Armitage’s In Defense of Presentism recuperates the term as one that might more generatively embrace the various cultural histories and praxes that constitute the formation of history as something that dismantles objectivity and impassibility. The confusion about presentism, Armitage realizes, is one that hampers historical reflection and in so doing forecloses our ethical obligations to historical research, which, in its best form, mandates a temporal mediation that looks to the history and present so as to inform trajectories for the future.²³ Even more, by Joni Adamson’s assessment, the roots of the environmental humanities can be and should be traced to the earliest cosmological narratives, stories and symbols of the world’s oldest cultures.²⁴ But theory, as we know, is different from application. We need, then, an environmental humanities that, by definition and framework, more capaciously and deliberately imagines how the work of scholars outside our current moment and century can contribute to diversifying the field. We thus need a longue durée of environmental humanist scholarship and teaching. This collection aids in that endeavor.

Figure I.1 Environmental humanities articles and their centuries of focus in five environmental humanities journals.

The proof is too often in the pudding. Take for example five flagship environmental humanities journals: Environmental Humanities; Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities; Nature and Culture; Journal of Ecocriticism; and Green Letters. At the time of writing this (in the throes of pandemic-situated 2020), in the collected issues, which includes roughly 550 essays, 310 (56%) explicitly address concerns of the twenty-first century, and an eye-opening 494 (89%) position environmental humanities concerns within the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. By our count, only nine essays (1.63%) take up eighteenth-century texts, topics, or histories. Figure I.1 illustrates these striking statistics.²⁵

Whither the eighteenth century in these environmental humanities platforms? Eighteenth-century scholars assuredly take up environmental concerns, but perhaps out of fear of the critique of presentism, they are not couched in the framework of the environmental humanities, per se. That is, the phrase environmental humanities appears potentially illegible, or at the very least obscured. As practiced in eighteenth-century studies, it inhabits many different subgenres. We need only review myriad special issues that are framed by the prominence of animals (Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies), the Anthropocene (The Eighteenth-Century Common), eco-gothic (Gothic Studies), climate change (Eighteenth-Century Studies), plant and insect studies (The Eighteenth Century: Theory & Interpretation), or ecocriticism (Eighteenth-Century Fiction). The relationship between eighteenth-century studies and the environmental humanities, as these trends elucidate, can be tenuous, which often results in a scholarly schism that suggests a conflict between eighteenth-century environmental scholarship and the environmental humanities.

This collection strives to bridge these divides with the hope of forging intersection. We thus imagine an eighteenth-century environmental humanities that operates, as Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin describe, transversally, so as to further develop transdisciplinary and transhistoric inquiry through generative cuts and grafts from which rich boundary-pushing scholarship might blossom.²⁶ The essays that follow do not process chronologically. This is deliberate. Such a chronology might gesture toward a historical progression or genealogy of eighteenth-century environmental humanities that would undermine our goals. Instead, the essays cut back, across, throughout, and within different historical junctures and archives found across the long eighteenth century.

What can, then, eighteenth-century studies bring to the environmental humanities? Or, put another way, how might the environmental humanities further evolve with more concerted attention to eighteenth-century studies? The authors featured here readily take up both these questions along five axes: climate change, new materialisms, the blue humanities, decoloniality and indigeneity, and green utopianism.

Chapters 1 through 3 elucidate the emergence of climate change discourses that have been brought to eighteenth-century studies and consider how eighteenth-century discourses can frame climate change knowledges. Seth Reno, Alessa Johns, Robert Markley, Dagomar Degroot, and David McCallam have repeatedly turned to climate change in both the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries to make sense of long histories of place-based knowledge and environmental disaster.²⁷ Degroot, for example, as a climate historian, acknowledges the issues of scale that accompany the difference between weather and climate and also cautions us, as scholars of a historical period reliant on particular archives, against simplistic determinism, or the way in which a single force or a set of single forces predetermine and alter human history.²⁸ Chapters 1 through 3 reject this deterministic thinking in favor of larger cultural, literary, epistemological, and historical trends that can address a variety of climate changes rather than a singular, monolithic climate change. Disaster seems to be a particular flavor of climate change scholarship, and Patsoura, Hulbert, and Sweeting address how eighteenth-century texts and authors remain fixated on disaster and its cultural ramifications.

In chapter 1, Elliot Patsoura examines and revises genealogies of geoengineering, alongside Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden (1791), to address the late-eighteenth-century preoccupation with and attempts to remediate the effects of the Little Ice Age. Patsoura’s Toward a Genealogy of Geoengineering: Erasmus Darwin and the Little Ice Age, sets the stage for a cluster of essays included here that speak to the intertwined scientific and supernatural logics that attempt to rationalize weather and its attendant phenomena. Patsoura identifies a fundamental irony in eighteenth-century (and contemporary) geoengineering proposals that seek to inhibit the ruptures caused by anthropogenic climate change. Namely, any attempt to imagine such hypotheses is immediately undercut by their untenability and inevitable failures. The chapter closes with a discussion of Darwin and his import in teaching British and German proto-Romantic and Romantic thought. Chapter 2, Storm Apostrophe, by Annette Hulbert, maps a climactic literary history by comparing Phillis Wheatley Peters’s storm poetry from Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) and Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (1789). By locating abolitionism alongside invocations of storms wrought by the Little Ice Age, Hulbert offers environmental attunement as a corollary for moral subjecthood. In the chapter’s conclusion, Hulbert acknowledges that by teaching these Black poets alongside M. NourbeSe Philip’s formally experimental Zong! we can approach the Gordian knot of the environmental humanities, new materialisms, and literary and artistic representations of an ontologically complex eighteenth-century world. Adam W. Sweeting furthers the discussion of stormy weather and brings New England theology to bear on the Great Storm of 1703 in chapter 3. ‘When Stormy Winds Happen’: Divine Providence, Climate Change Discourse, and the Cause of Weather Disasters reveals a striking parallelism between early-eighteenth-century theology and scientific discourses, which contribute to apprehending anthropogenic climate change. Acknowledging his own situatedness, and that of his teaching in Boston, Sweeting reflects on the historical cuts that might knit together early-eighteenth-century providential models of changing climates and the climate realities American coastal cities face