Late Holocene Poetics: Genre and Geohistory in Beachy Head

Abstract

ABSTRACT Might we read the changing work of literary genre as a signature of the Holocene–Anthropocene transition, a symbolic parallel to the lithostratigraphic markers sought by geologists? I argue that the rise and fall of rural descriptive poetry in Britain may index an early but formative phase of this epochal transition. Charlotte Smith’s “Beachy Head” (1807) is my example of a late Holocene poetics closely attuned to the planetary forces energizing capitalism as a world ecology but largely unable to represent, except in the negative, the emergence of fossil capitalism. Internalized in the form of “Beachy Head,” I suggest, is a pre-thermodynamic conception of the intertwinement of planetary and socio-historical forces, a model of energy exchange that takes as its paradigmatic object not the steam engine but the climate system, and which takes as its source of input not the stock of subterranean coal but the flow of solar radiance. By recovering this late Holocene imaginary, we gain a different vantage on the Anthropocene, as an epoch in which climatological exigency has been not transcended but intensified by the fossil energy regime.