Publications and Research
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
10-9-2024
Abstract
How does one begin to talk about the end? Contemporary artistic and literary responses to climate change frequently invoke Romantic traditions, in part because many theorists attribute our current crisis to historical developments in the Romantic period, but also as means of representing how climate change collapses the familiar orderliness of time. This essay is about the narrative forms that emerge when our place of safety is revealed to be as unstable as melting permafrost. It centers on Mary Shelley’s 1825 essay about a frozen Englishman reanimated during that especially warm summer. I read Shelley’s essay anachronistically alongside contemporary climate art in order to explore narrative forms that disrupt the linear progression of time and suggest the possibility of other narratives that might emerge in the plurality of our endings. We are accustomed to thinking of Romanticism as environmentally informed by ice. This essay is about the thaw.
Included in
Literature in English, British Isles Commons, Literature in English, North America Commons
Comments
This is the accepted version of the following article: “Palimbiosis,” Essays in Romanticism vol. 31, no. 2 (October 2024), 87–112, which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.3828/eir.2024.31.2.2. This article may be used in accordance with the Liverpool University Press Self-Archiving Policy.