Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion by Elizabeth Carolyn Miller

Abstract

Reviewed by: Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion by Elizabeth Carolyn Miller Sebastian Egholm Lund (bio) Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion by Elizabeth Carolyn Miller; pp. 304. Princeton UP, 2021. $95.00 cloth In a time not long ago, I, a rosy-cheeked graduate student, contemplated applying for a position as a PhD fellow as I, a child of climate change, was intrigued by the enormous diffusion of fossil fuels and sites in the literature of the Victorian era. I soon realized that one of the authoritative figures in the field of Victorian studies, Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, was amid such a project—naturally, one designed in a much, much more erudite manner than mine. I am glad, however, because Miller has written a book far beyond [End Page 128] the scope of my capabilities. It is brilliantly thought out, wonderfully well written, and extremely well executed. In short, the book is not so much about a genre or a topos (e.g., "coal literature" or "the mine") as it is a piece of eco-historicism that deals with the matrix of what Miller terms "extractivism": a "complex of cultural, economic, environmental, and ideological factors related to the extraction of underground resources on a large, industrial scale" (6). Indeed, Miller's digging into the past is founded upon the wish to examine the multivalent traffic between matter and ideas (13). She seeks to show how changes in narrative conditioned by changes in energy systems function as feedback loops conditioning infrastructural paths and environmental change (14). More specifically, these endeavours are channelled through Miller's global project of describing how the industrialization of underground resource extraction shaped literary form (1830–1930) just as different genres "contributed to new ways of imagining an extractible Earth" (2). As such, Extraction Ecologies deals with literary-environmental exchange. It rests on the idea "that discourse makes environment as environment makes discourse" (3). It is a piece of naturecultural literary history. Miller's archaeological study of the "extractivist" discourse and its feedback flows, therefore, implies an ecological view of genre as an archive of sediment that testifies to environmental changes over time. Extraction Ecologies seeks to think historically about extraction, ecology, and literature through the lens of our troubled present, thus providing a humanist genealogy of our current fossil fuel calamities. Overall, Miller's work contributes to the onrushing field of ecocritical Victorian studies, which has been developed in recent landmark studies such as Jesse Oak Taylor's The Sky of Our Manufacture (2016) and Tobias Menely's Climate and the Making of Worlds (2021). Like Menely's and Taylor's, Miller's ecocritical method is solidly based on a materialist reading of the interchange between language and environment. Extraction Ecologies's singular perspective on extraction, nevertheless, places it firmly in the interdisciplinary field of energy humanities, with clear references to previous work by Allen MacDuffie in Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination (2014) and Cara New Daggett in The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work (2019). Extraction Ecologies is organized conceptually into three distinctive parts devoted to the three central categories of time, space, and energy. These categories, Miller argues, undergo fundamental changes in the three corresponding genres of provincial realism, adventure literature, and speculative fiction. Each chapter of the book is devoted to one category and one genre. All parts deal with tracing how extractivism formats each conceptual domain. This study of literary form has evolved out of Miller's hypothesis that orders of time, space, and energy alter profoundly with the rise of extraction-based life (18). [End Page 129] In the first part of the book, through enlightening readings of prominent works, such as Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1852) and D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers (1913), as well as more obscure books, such as Fanny Mayne's Jane Rutherford: or, The Miner's Strike (1853), Miller shows how the rise of extractivism alters the experience of time and futurity in a way that defies typical novelistic temporalities of provincial realism (30). According to Miller, these novels all share a chronotopic linkage of place and time that...