Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion. By Elizabeth Carolyn Miller

Abstract

The nineteenth century is often used as the boundary marker for the commencement of industrial extraction. While numerous studies utilize this marker to frame their claims, they rarely engage with the cultures that created and accepted that material/energy transition. Understanding those cultures, though, is critical for understanding our present crises as linked phenomena. In Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion, Elizabeth Carolyn Miller illuminates one of those cultures and its echoes. Miller shows how industrial mining and fuel use influenced nineteenth-century Anglophone literature, and even created literary forms that today enable our collective intransigence regarding the climate crisis spawned by those very same systems of extraction. In Extraction Ecologies, Miller analyzes three different prose genres—the provincial realist novel, the adventure narrative, and speculative fiction—and demonstrates how those genres evince extractive ecologies in different ways. The provincial realist novel, for instance, charts “exhaustive futures” for its characters where social energy is depleted during the plot, eliminating any hope for subsequent generations. The adventure novel translates imperial schemes for colonial wealth into character movement across the land and into it. Speculative fiction uses worldbuilding to work through the energy anxieties of the age and imagine alternative energy-culture formations. Extraction Ecologies analyzes both canonical Victorian novels such as Hard Times (1854) by Charles Dickens and The Time Machine (1895) by H. G. Wells, while also including works from historically marginalized authors, such as Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857) by Mary Seacole and “Sultana’s Dream” (1905) by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain. The analysis of these works is laid out for the reader’s ease: the table of contents is subdivided by text, making it simple to turn to a specific one. The chapters have a straightforward structure with a brief theoretical and historical introduction followed by the case studies. This is not to say that the writing is fragmentary or the structure formulaic, though. Rather, Miller’s writing is approachable, even during more complex analytic moments, and the structure of Extraction Ecologies flows smoothly from one case to the next.