Sebastian Egholm Lund: Changing the Climate at the Fin de Siècle: Science, Fiction, and the Anthropocene?

Sebastian Egholm Lund 

Changing the Climate at the Fin de Siècle: Science, Fiction, and the Anthropocene? 
 

At the end of the nineteenth century, a plethora of literary authors began imagining that humanity could change the global climate. Paradoxically, they did not draw on the scientific paradigm of global warming, but rather its perverse inverse: global climate control. Rigorously contextualized by the atmospheric events, science, and technology of the nineteenth century, this study compares how canonical figures such as Mark Twain and neglected authors such as Rokeya Hossain represented anthropogenic climate change as a deliberate action. In the process, it argues that these authors promoted a hitherto neglected awareness of the Anthropocene not through prophetic representations of catastrophic change but Promethean fantasies of control. Revelatory for scholars working in nineteenth-century studies and the environmental humanities, this is the story of the progressive inscription of climate control into Western modernism and modernity long before the advent of “global warming.”

Sebastian Egholm Lund is a Research Assistant at Comparative Literature, Aarhus University. He has been a Visiting Scholar at the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities, and he holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Aarhus University. For the last two years, he has been a Junior Research Fellow at the Faculty of English, University of Oxford. He has published numerous articles in field-defining international journals such as Interdisciplinary Studies of Literature and Environment and Comparative Literature. He has received four academic prizes, most recently, Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies’ Richard Stein Essay Prize. Changing the Climate at the Fin de Siècle is his first monograph.

Æstetisk Seminar er tilrettelagt af Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen og Mads Anders Baggesgaard, Institut for Kommunikation og Kultur, Aarhus Universitet.

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