Acknowledgments

This book could not have been realized without the belief, encouragement, and support of more people than can be named here. If you are one of them, I want to thank you.

First and foremost, my family: Daisy, Max, and Theodore, who showed me love, patience, and a willingness to make this work a major part of their daily lives. Mom, and my sister Jenna. This book is for you.

The ideas in these pages began to take shape during my graduate studies at Cornell University, where I had the privilege of working with excellent mentors who guided me through the formative stages of what you are about to read. I am especially grateful to the members of my dissertation committee, Jeremy Braddock, Cathy Caruth, Elisha Cohn, and Jonathan Culler, who provided intellectual foundations on which to build and taught me how to think harder about texts. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation generously supported me as a Graduate Fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, where I worked with an outstanding cohort of scholars, including Laura Schaefer Brown, Craig Campbell, Rayna Kalas, and Ricardo Wilson, who read carefully and provided excellent feedback. I also benefited from a grant to attend the School of Criticism and Theory, where I learned much from Ian Baucom and many others.

I owe my friends and colleagues at Cornell, King’s, and beyond, who read and fixed too many drafts – especially Jon Day, Alex Niven, Daniel Radus, Scott Selisker, and Xine Yao – enormous debts of time and energy. Thanks as well to the many scholars who have taken an interest in the project and provided help and advice – Liz Anker, Sarah Cole, Jed Esty, Kate Flint, Nathan Hensley, Dana Luciano, Clare Pettitt, Karen Pinkus, Paul K. Saint-Amour, Nick Salvato, and Mark Turner are among those finer makers.

This work has been made possible by an Early Career Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust and King’s College London, whose support I most gratefully acknowledge. Earlier versions of Chapters 1 and 2 have appeared previously as “Romancing the Anthropocene: H. G. Wells and the Genre of the Future” in NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, and “Infinitesimal Lives: Thomas Hardy’s Scale Effects” in Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire, respectively. I would like to thank Nancy Armstrong, Nathan Hensley, and Philip Steer for their clear and excellent guidance.

It has been a pleasure to work with Cambridge University Press, and I would like to thank Bethany Thomas, George Laver, Becky Jackaman, the series editors, and the anonymous readers who made this happen.