Abstract
The temporal structures of provincial realist novels set in extraction landscapes convey the new understanding of futurity that attended the nineteenth-century rise of an industrial system powered by a nonrenewable, diminishing stock of underground resources. Focusing on Joseph Conrad'sNostromo(1904), George Eliot'sThe Mill on the Floss(1860), and Fanny Mayne'sJane Rutherford; Or, the Miners' Strike(1853), this article demonstrates how these works adapt the provincial realist novel's emphasis on social renewal by way of marriage, reproduction, and inheritance to the extraction-based society of industrial Britain, undergirded by a trajectory of depletion and exhaustion rather than renewal. These works' deviation from novelistic chrononormativity expresses a new understanding of an extraction-based present that is claimed at the expense of future generations.
Highlights
A nitroglycerine advertisement in the January 1868 issue of the Mining Journal boasts, “The EXPLOSIVE FORCE of this BLASTING OIL is TEN TIMES that of GUNPOWDER, and the ECONOMY and SAVING in TIME, LABOUR, and COST in removing granite and hard rock, in sinking shafts, driving tunnels, and opening forward in close ends is immense”.2 Mining, drilling, and mineral resource extraction accelerated exponentially under the global force of nineteenth-century industrialism, transforming space and, as this advertisement suggests, time
The rise of industrial extractivism occasioned a complex reckoning with prevailing ideas of time and futurity; it saw the imagining of a new future, one that was, in key ways, undetermined and indeterminable—in other words, open
Two centuries into industrial life, we find ourselves in the midst of a complex, many-sided environmental crisis whose scope we are still struggling to grasp, and many of the most pressing hazards associated with this crisis—such as climate change and air, water, and soil pollution—have resulted from the extraction ecologies of industrial capitalism that emerged in the nineteenth century
Summary
The conditions of production are at the same time the conditions of reproduction. A nitroglycerine advertisement in the January 1868 issue of the Mining Journal boasts, “The EXPLOSIVE FORCE of this BLASTING OIL is TEN TIMES that of GUNPOWDER, and the ECONOMY and SAVING in TIME, LABOUR, and COST in removing granite and hard rock, in sinking shafts, driving tunnels, and opening forward in close ends is immense” (fig. 1). Mining, drilling, and mineral resource extraction accelerated exponentially under the global force of nineteenth-century industrialism, transforming space and, as this advertisement suggests, time. The temporal structures of provincial realist novels set in extraction landscapes convey a growing nineteenth-century sense of extractionbased life as untethered to the seasonal rhythms of the living earth, and they convey a new conception of futurity imbued with the realization that Britain was reliant on an industrial system powered by a nonrenewable, diminishing stock of resources. Such novels are premised not on the human life cycle, like the bildungsroman, nor the seasons of the year, like the pastoral; they are instead premised on the notion of DRILL, BABY, DRILL 31 a depleted or undead future. As the steam engine and other industrial technologies were transforming the scale and effects of mining, nineteenth-century cultural discourse around exhaustion, supply, futurity, and decline reached a new stage as well, leaching into the endings, trajectories, and temporalities of that characteristic nineteenth-century literary form, the realist novel
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