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Subsurface
Series: Posthumanities
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Format: Paperback / softback
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Book Hero Magic created this recommendation. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! IS THIS YOUR NEXT READ?
Subsurface is ideal for readers interested in environmental humanities, literary criticism, and climate studies. This thought-provoking book will appeal to academics, students, and thoughtful readers who enjoy interdisciplinary approaches to literature and critical theory, particularly those curious about the cultural narratives underpinning climate change and resource extraction.
A bold new consideration of climate change between narratives of the Earth’s layers and policy of the present. Karen Pinkus looks below the surface of texts by Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Sand, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Jules Verne to find the buried origins of capitalist fantasies in which humans take what they want from the earth.
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Description
A bold new consideration of climate change between narratives of the Earth's layers and policy of the present
Long seen as a realm of mystery and possibility, the subsurface beneath our feet has taken on all-too-real import in the era of climate change. Can reading narratives of the past that take imaginative leaps under the surface better attune us to our present knowledge of a warming planet?
In Subsurface, Karen Pinkus looks below the surface of texts by Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Sand, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Jules Verne to find the buried origins of capitalist fantasies in which humans take what they want from the earth. Putting such texts into conversation with narrative theory, critical theory, geology, and climate policy, she shows that the subsurface has been, in our past, a place of myth and stories of male voyages down to gain knowledge—but it is also now the realm of fossil fuels. How do these two modes intertwine?
A highly original take on evocative terms such as extraction, burial, fossils, deep time, and speculative futurity, Subsurface questions the certainty of comfortable narrative arcs. It asks us to read literature with and against the figure of the geological column, with and against fossil fuels and the emissions warming our planet. As we see our former selves move into the distance, what new modes of imagination might we summon?
Series: Posthumanities
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Book Hero Magic summarised reviews for this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! HOW HAS THIS BEEN REVIEWED?
Celebrated by scholars like Verena Andermatt Conley of Harvard University, Subsurface is praised for its witty and insightful blending of nineteenth-century literature with pressing geological and environmental concerns. Reviewers commend Pinkus's stratigraphic approach to criticism which maps climate change across layers of narrative and history. It is hailed as a foundational contribution to environmental and energy humanities, uncovering new dimensions in classic subterranean stories while engaging with contemporary climate debates.
Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9781517914790
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Format: Paperback / softback
Date Published: 18 April 2023
Country: United States
Imprint: University of Minnesota Press
Illustration: 22 black and white illustrations
Audience: General / adult, Professional and scholarly
DIMENSIONS
Spine width: 10.0mm
Width: 140.0mm
Height: 216.0mm
Weight: 283g
Pages: 240
Collections
About the Author
Karen Pinkus is professor of romance studies and comparative literature at Cornell University. She is author of several books, including Fuel: A Speculative Dictionary (Minnesota, 2016).
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