This chapter traces the alignment between the Victorian novel, the articulation of geological, or “deep” time, and the emergence of the Anthropocene. The Victorian era is usually understood in terms of “uniformitarian” geology, in which Earth changes slowly and gradually, an understanding that has also informed understandings of the novel in the period. By contrast, this chapter unearths a latent “catastrophism” in Victorian fiction, examining geological events and underground spaces that reconfigure the conditions of possibility in works by Charles Dickens, Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, Bram Stoker, and Thomas Hardy.

Chapter 1 maps out the theoretical and cultural context for the early twenty-first century’s multi-scalar view of life. Progressing from the microscopic scale to the planetary perspective, I present the recent shifts in microbiology, biomedicine, anthropology, and Earth system science that are shaping our awareness of interdependence between living processes. In each domain, I draw attention to the narrative and rhetorical aspects of these epistemological shifts. This overview leads me to discuss some of the theoretical terminology frequently used to conceptualise interdependence across scales, and the different models of life brought into play by the terms process, network, assemblage, and meshwork. The final section outlines the scalar rhetoric and tropes of early twenty-first-century popular science. Here I examine the relation between trans-scalar rhetoric, which emphasises the necessity of thinking across scales, and multi-scalar tropes, which substitute one scale of life for another. From a scale-critical perspective, I examine the epistemological tensions at work in those tropes.

The Conclusion formulates the ethical role that I attribute to multi-scalar poetics in the context of an accelerating ecological crisis. I argue that narrative fiction can enable response-ability towards multiple scales of life and scale-bound perspectives. I expand the concept of scalar irony, which I defend here as an eco-political mode of attention that fiction enables for the reader. Returning to the question of analogy, I argue against the temptation to hierarchise non-analogical tropes above analogical ones, and propose that literature’s power lies in its capacity to turn all tropes into sites of epistemic and ethical negotiation.

In this chapter, I detail the racial logics of the Anthropocene in its current discursive formation, focusing on three related critiques of the term. First, I show how the Anthropocene logic is derived from the categorization impulse of the geosciences, an epistemic push that has close ties to histories of racial science. A critical reading of geology has shown that the categorization of strata performs a similar pedagogy to the “family tree of man.” Second, this categorization is framed by the progressive narrative of modernity. In the Anthropocene, as an often apocalyptic narrative, the whiteness of historical time shows through and privileges a “colorblind” lens for the Anthropocene. Third, the objective description of the Anthropocene presents a universalizing narrative, one that has trouble detailing the differential experiences of environmental impacts. This universality reifies race into the oncoming environmental crisis even as it attempts to celebrate a world without divisions and differences. Finally, I draw from the critiques of the Anthropocene to highlight the multiple stories that are being told of the geophysical, ecological, and societal changes.

Chapter 6 analyses the ironies of multi-scalar focalisation. I read Margaret Atwood’s ‘Torching the Dusties’ (2014), T. C. Boyle’s The Terranauts (2016), and Ali Smith’s Winter (2017) as ironic exercises in ‘bringing the biosphere home’ which satirise their focalisers’ limited perception. The difficulty of biosphere perception is highlighted in each of these texts through visual hallucinations and blind spots, which represent ethical failure. These stories respond satirically to the difficulty of perceiving a planetary ecological crisis, and question the idea of enlightenment as a step towards environmental responsibility. This fiction does not work didactically, but neither does it endorse the cynical perspective. Instead, it explores an ironic mode of multi-scalar attention which holds together incompatible perspectives. This leads me to define scalar irony as an epistemic and ethical tool which offers a way forward for Anthropocene response-ability.

This chapter explores the category of the “EcoGothic” that has emerged out of the attempt by Gothic Studies to confront the reality of the climate crisis and ideas of the Anthropocene. The Gothic is often presented as a privileged mode, given its interest in affective states of fear and horror and its ability to operate at different scales from domestic realism. It can evoke apocalypse and planetary transformations, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to John Ruskin’s late lectures on storm clouds. The chapter proposes the EcoGothic be considered less as a set of objects or texts than a method of apprehension of many kinds of Victorian cultural objects. Authors discussed include Edmund Burke, Anne Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, Charles Lyell, Charles Darwin, H. G. Wells, Robert Louis Stevenson, M. P. Shiel, H. P. Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood, and others.

Chapter 3 discusses the critical potential of environmental synecdoche in works of fiction that question the autonomy of human agency. Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007) and Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy (2014) mock fantasies of control by portraying humans as inseparable from multi-scalar assemblages and symbiotic associations. I read these novels as experiments in the cognitive modelling of agency at unfamiliar scales: both the microscale of a postgenomic imaginary and the macroscale of planet and species demanded by Anthropocene awareness. These fictions, I suggest, explore the difficulty of reconciling environmental responsibility with the dispersal of agency inherent to biomedical and ecological perspectives. Both novels experiment with multi-scalar tropes as a means of modelling agency at unfamiliar scales and enabling environmental response-ability. In each narrative, I contrast the lure of analogical images with the poetics of critical synecdoche, which engages productively with the complexity of diffuse environmental agency.

Chapter 6 explores three plausible trajectories for humanity’s future: a “failed world,” a “good Anthropocene,” and a middle path of “buying time.” The failed-world scenario envisions societal collapse fueled by self-reinforcing feedbacks between environmental degradation, power concentration, stress, and eroding trust. In this trajectory, far-right populism and rising inequality lead to nationalism, global cooperation breakdown, and mass displacement due to climate change. Conversely, the good Anthropocene imagines democratic resilience, institutional reform, carbon neutrality, and a cultural shift away from materialism. It emphasizes prosocial values, equitable governance, and low-footprint lifestyles grounded in leisure and morality rather than consumption. The third scenario, buying time, reflects the complexities of slow global transformation, proposing adaptive migration and geoengineering as interim measures. Drawing on history, the chapter argues that systemic change—though gradual—can unfold over a century, as with past social reforms. However, unchecked delays risk irreversible damage.

Why Gothic sensibility and aesthetics matters for Ruskin as he prevails against the broken world warranted by laissez-faire economics. Ruskin, in his concept of ‘plague clouds’, is one of the first to locate what has become known as the Anthropocene. The chapter details the characteristics of Gothic, which will then frame the inquiry into craft work.

This essay explores the relevance of William James’s thought for addressing the contemporary climate crisis, thereby putting his thinking to a pragmatist test: what can we do with James in today’s world, marked by an unprecedented shattering of certainties, indeed of worlds? In the first part of the essay, James’s writings are revisited and the echoes of the Anthropocene are traced in view of the continuities and ruptures between his time and ours. This seems important because, if, as Dipesh Chakrabarty has pointed out, the imprint of human action on the earth is so profound as to challenge the very sense of historical continuity, then we must question the continuing validity of our intellectual past in order to think through our present. In the second part, the essay reinterprets James’s radical empiricism and pragmatism as philosophical responses to worlds in upheaval, countering simplistic readings of James as a “happy pragmatist” who simply goes for what works. It is precisely because James thought in the face of a troubled present – and not simply about it – that his philosophy can be made to matter into today’s world in turmoil.

The chapter details recent and future climate changes, primarily caused by anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases. This period of time is now commonly referred to as the Anthropocene. The chapter begins with a critical discussion of the hypothesis that anthropogenic activities have already begun to significantly impact the global climate since the mid-Holocene. The climate changes observed during the last century and their attribution to human activities are presented. The concept of anthropogenic emission scenarios and projections of future climate change are then described. The results of several future model simulations are shown, and the most robust aspects of future climate change projections and their potential impacts on natural systems and humanity are discussed. Finally, the possibility of predicting the very long-term future (beyond the current millennia) is discussed and possible scenarios are presented.

How were seventeenth-century projects of wetland improvement remembered and revived in the centuries that followed? What remnants of wetlands past persist in popular memory, troublesome spirits, floodwaters, and nature reserves? This chapter traces afterlives of the turbulence and tumult generated by fen projects. In doing so, it weaves together the key strands of this book. First, new intellectual and political tools were needed to define and implement wetland improvement, reconceiving the scale of environmental thought and action in early modern England. Second, customary politics proved a powerful force in the negotiation of improvement as commoners intervened in the flow of water, the exercise of property rights, and the practice of sovereignty. Finally, coercive projects of environmental change expanded cracks in the exercise of central authority, becoming entangled in civil war conflict and imperilling the stability of improvement. It concludes by asking what conflict over early modern wetlands can tell us about the environmental politics of the Anthropocene.