Peter Adkins. The Modernist Anthropocene: Nonhuman Life and Planetary Change in James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes

Abstract

1922 is widely regarded as an annus mirabilis of modernism: the year of Ulysses, The Waste Land, Jacob’s Room, and a host of other texts, literary and otherwise, hoisted up by modernist scholars for the purpose of centennial reckonings. One book that seems to have remained in the dusty shadows during the 2022 commemorations, though, is R. L. Sherlock’s Man as a Geological Agent. Sherlock, a geographer at Cambridge University, presciently recognized that ‘Man’s action on Nature has two aspects: a geological and a biological one’. Nearly 80 years before Paul Crutzen declared to a conference room full of earth systems scientists that ‘we’re in the… the… the Anthropocene!’, Sherlock knew that human industry had already made a measurable impact on the planet’s ecosystems, climates, and geological features. The human signature was written in the ‘mines, quarries, civic infrastructure, roads, railways, waterways, coastal developments, agriculture and forestry’ that changed more than just the surface of the earth. I first learned of Sherlock’s work while reading Peter Adkins’ The Modernist Anthropocene. Adkins’ book is a critical study of how three major English language novelists registered the kinds of environmental changes that Sherlock understood to be an anthropogenic re-engineering of nature itself. James Joyce, Djuna Barnes, and Virginia Woolf ‘intuited the idea of the Anthropocene,’ argues Adkins, just as much as Sherlock and a few other discerning scientists did. Their experiments in novel form mediated ‘new structures of subjectivity’ that were not just modern—they were Anthropocenic.