Reviewed by: Conrad and Nature: Essays ed. by Lissa Schneider-Rebozo, Jeffrey Mathes McCarthy, and John G. Peters Elizabeth Carolyn Miller (bio) Conrad and Nature: Essays, edited by Lissa Schneider-Rebozo, Jeffrey Mathes McCarthy, and John G. Peters; pp. vii + 328. New York: Routledge, 2019, $155.00, £120.00. As the methodologies of ecocriticism and the environmental humanities continue to advance, what effect might they have on the fate of single-author studies? On the one hand, the precept to "always ecologize" seems to demand that we conceptualize authors and their work within wide, interconnected webs of relation far more dispersed than any single individual. On the other hand, the "bio" in biographical criticism describes an entity fully legible from an ecological perspective: every author an organism, every text a coproduction of the organism and its environment. The editors of Conrad and Nature: Essays, Lissa Schneider-Rebozo, Jeffrey Mathes McCarthy, and John G. Peters, make no claim for the single-author approach; instead, their rationale for the volume, described in the book's introduction, is to reimagine Conrad studies for the twenty-first century. Joseph Conrad's body of work undoubtedly offers a rich subject for environmental analysis. For readers who make their way through the collection, Conrad will emerge as one of the great observers of the nineteenth-century natural world and how it transformed under the devastating forces of imperialism and global capitalism. The breadth of his engagements with sea and with land, and with many different parts of the world, is on remarkable display in the articles gathered here. The first essay collection to focus on nature and environment in the work of Conrad, the volume includes thirteen new essays as well as excerpts from four older, classic works of Conrad scholarship. The approach highlights a remarkable contrast in the way nature and the environment were discussed in literary criticism of the 1980s, 1990s, and even the 2000s—when it was still possible to use the word "nature" without quotation marks—as opposed to the conceptual frameworks that underpin the volume's newer essays. Some of the ways of thinking the human-natural relation in the older essays feel utterly alien from the vantage points of the Anthropocene and climate change, and probably would have seemed so from the perspective of the fast-changing world Conrad inhabited as well. Our current situation of ecological vulnerability allows us to see features of these texts that were less visible a few decades ago, in the flush of neoliberal surplus. Conrad's portrayal of the natural world has long been recognized as central to his work, as the inclusion of these older essays shows, but the very different presuppositions we now bring to such analysis mean that much reconsideration remains to be done. The volume is arranged conceptually with sections on "Conrad and the Anthropocene," "Conrad's Atmospherics," "Conrad, Ethics and Ecology," "Nature, Empire and Commerce," and "Earlier Commentary." The authors of the newer essays have various ambitions and motivations, with some wanting to make an original contribution to ecocritical concepts and methods, and others wanting to trace Conrad's developmental trajectory as a writer of the natural world. As is to be expected, some chapters are more successful than others, but [End Page 320] one will learn from the volume as a whole a great deal about Conrad and about the many different natures he inhabited and chronicled. The volume begins with a showstopping essay by Jesse Oak Taylor on Heart of Darkness (1902), "Wilderness After Nature: Conrad, Empire and the Anthropocene," an essay that aims at nothing less than to salvage the concept of wilderness for the Anthropocene. The wilderness concept, as Taylor explains, has long been rejected for its associations with settler environmentalism, as in William Cronon's "The Trouble with Wilderness" (1995). "What is the 'wilderness' that finds Kurtz out early?" Taylor's essay asks, then answers: not nature untrammeled, but rather "the contact zone between the metropolitan economy and the resource base on which it feeds" (21). By redefining wilderness in terms of "novel ecosystems"—the "distinctive habitats brought into being through human action and ecological disturbance" (22)—Taylor theorizes an Anthropocene wilderness, offering, along...