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.

Chapter 2 compares three narratives that construe landscapes as multi-scalar relational fields. In Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004), Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes (1999), and A. S. Byatt’s ‘A Stone Woman’ (2003), environments are cast not as settings but as living actors of the story. I read these poetics through anthropologist Tim Ingold’s conceptualisation of landscape as a meshwork of entangled lines of life, to suggest that these fictions turn landscapes into mediators connecting human with ecosystemic scales, and biological temporality with ‘geostory’. My analysis focuses on the recurring trope of the microcosm, which allows fiction to explore large-scale ecological disruption through smaller organisms and environments. The microcosm, I argue, is a figure in tension, which acts here simultaneously as a trans-scalar viewing instrument and as a disruptor of relations between scales. I read this trope as a critical tool of ecological awareness because it foregrounds and questions scalar collapse – the epistemic projection of one scale onto another.

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.

Chapter 4 discusses the ethical potential of fictional trans-scalar encounters. Richard Powers’s The Overstory (2018) and Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013) confront human characters with unfamiliar scales of existence: the slow time of trees, the multitudinous identity of forest or flock, the accelerating time of climate change, and the geographical patterns of collective migration. Both novels highlight disjunctions between scales as a key obstacle to environmental response-ability, by contrasting a sacrificed location with globalisation’s discourse of prosperity. These stories also highlight the fractures between individual and species-scale behaviour, and the difficulty of relating to the self as species. These fault lines lead me to ask whether allegorical narrative might in itself constitute a hindrance to trans-scalar ethics by smoothing out disjunctions and scale effects. I suggest that metalepsis acts as a counterweight to allegory in these novels. By construing trans-scalar encounters as frame-breaking events, metalepsis opens up the possibility of ethical relation.

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.

Chapter 5 compares two novels that portray the self as a multi-scalar collective. Reading David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks (2014) alongside Greg Bear’s Darwin’s Radio (1999), I show that both novels represent the self as a space of cohabitation and co-evolution, where symbiotic relations embed the temporality of human characters within other timescales. I read these plots as symbiopolitical experiments that question the ‘dis-embedding’ of life performed by biocapitalism. Because it resists the separation of self from non-self, the symbiotic subject destabilises the type of immunological politics theorised by Roberto Esposito and Frédéric Neyrat, where fantasies of biological and social immunity are built upon defensive boundaries. In these novels, such immunitary fantasies are undermined by metaleptic poetics, where the self is both co-written by others within and forced to position itself within the narrative of its own species. These strange loops open up the narrative of the self to the necessity of symbiopolitical relations.

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.

The Introduction observes that a significant strand of twenty-first-century fiction is attempting to connect the human to other-than-human scales. I suggest that this fiction performs epistemic and ethical work because it foregrounds relations of biological and ecological interdependence. I situate my study in the context of scale theory and outline the eco-political and symbiopolitical stakes of scalar rhetoric. I then highlight the different ways in which multi-scalar poetics stimulate ontological and ethical questioning, produce new conceptions of self, agency, and environment, and ultimately enable ecological response-ability. Scale-switching, I argue, is not only a significant writing practice but a necessary reading methodology. I then introduce the three main devices analysed in the book: critical synecdoche, ontological metalepsis, and scalar irony.

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.

This chapter introduces the anti-colonial ideology of Arab nationalism, which in its popular form established a transregional culture of resistance to oppression and injustice. Progressive writers of the decolonization generation, the author shows, mapped their new literary system’s imaginative and circulational scale according to the experience that they believed it must represent and amplify: a shared political experience they called “Arab.” The chapter then discusses the key concepts of Arab scale and transregionalism. It outlines their nuanced entanglements between national and world literatures, and notes the significance of embedded, internal scales that texture and differentiate the system under study. Overall, the chapter argues that a major expression of twentieth-century Arabic literature produced itself as a set of print culture practices, literary themes, and interpretive norms in response to evolving ideas of Arab experience and emancipation.

Chapter 9 explores what the transregional system excluded. Algerian novelist al-Tahir Wattar’s novel al-Lāz (The Ace, 1974) was rejected by Mashreq publishers in the 1970s for its purported denigration of the Algerian War of Independence. Refusing the elevation of the war to a sacred origin in Algerian state nationalism, Ace also broke transregional literature’s taboos. In this corpus, Algeria’s revolution is a quasi-mythic zone of noble deeds, honorable men, and utile language. Transregionalism evacuates moral and political ambiguity to secure the war as the ground from which it can narrate the emotional unities of Arab collectives. Ace’s deconstruction of the war as national, founding myth had a domestic target: to unmask what historian Benjamin Stora called the Algerian state’s “faceless” revolution and repopulate the war’s memory with living, disagreeing Algerians. Yet this account of the war also rendered Ace disruptive to transregional circuits and unlikely, in the eyes of publishers, to find a reading market. Wattar’s undisputed prominence in Algerian literature thus contrasts with his marginality in the corpus of transregional Arabic literature and Arabic literary studies. Transgressing the conventions transregional literature erected around Algeria, Ace figures an interpretive sensibility to come, merging thought and emotion to explore new imaginaries of emancipation.

This chapter reads writings on and in Arabic in the Moroccan avant-garde journals Souffle and Anfās (1966–1971) between national and transregional scales for literature. After 1969, this movement produced itself as a periphery within transregional literature by plugging into literary networks with the Mashreq, particularly Beirut. Contributors experimented with various forms of fuṣḥā – from iconoclastic, futurist poetics to dogmatic Marxist-Leninist prose – to found the written Arabic to express Moroccan literature’s belonging in an unfolding Arab revolution and to shatter the Moroccan monarchy’s monopoly over the language as the sign of permanent, sacred, Arab-Islamic national culture. For Souffles–Anfās, Morocco’s connection to transregionalism lay in the people’s emotional connection to the Arabic language and their Arab nationalist sentiments. This avant-garde movement sought – but never found – a Moroccan poetry to launch into the transregional system. The chapter reads issues of Anfās as transregional literature, Arabic poetics in bilingual Souffles, and translational engagements in French with a future Moroccan Arabic.

Several contemporary works of Afro-Asian fiction turn simultaneously to the past and the ocean to challenge ethnically exclusive, territorial models of national belonging in the present, generating alternative cartographies interlinking the Indian Ocean world. This means the past is not simply a background against which their narratives unfold—that is, their historical setting—but the past itself functions as an intertext through which an Indian Ocean world gets reimagined. The Introduction examines the rhetoric of loss and recovery in Indian Ocean discourses as a way to theorize the Indian Ocean as a spatio-temporal scale for analyzing literature’s relationship to the past. It explicates the term “anarchival drift” as a self-reflexive mode of addressing the past in Afro-Asian fiction. This historical orientation in literature is not driven by a nostalgic desire to recover the past but rather it serves to excavate the historicity of the present. The chapter illustrates this through a reading of romance and history in Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land (1992).

In Chapter 7 I discuss the consequences, as regards the theory of virtue, of Plotinus’ denial that ‘spirit’ (thumos) and ‘desire’ (epithumia) are parts of the nature of soul. This denial contrasts with Plato’s tripartition of the soul (which includes spirit and desire) in the Republic, where the tripartition serves to define the four cardinal virtues. However, Plotinus defines these ‘political’ virtues in a different way, as the knowledge and the measure and order brought by rational soul to the affects which arise in the living body. Plotinus introduces furthermore a higher level of virtues, the ‘greater’ virtues. I discuss the relation between these two levels of virtue, in particular as regards the nature of this scale. I argue that in Plotinus the lower (‘political’) virtues are imperfect if possessed without the greater virtues

Volume I offers a broad perspective on urban culture in the ancient European world. It begins with chronological overviews which paint in broad brushstrokes a picture that serves as a frame for the thematic chapters in the rest of the volume. Positioning ancient Europe within its wider context, it touches on Asia and Africa as regions that informed and were later influenced by urban development in Europe, with particular emphasis on the Mediterranean basin. Topics range from formal characteristics (including public space), water provision, waste disposal, urban maintenance, spaces for the dead, and border spaces; to ways of thinking about, visualising, and remembering cities in antiquity; to conflict within and between cities, economics, mobility and globalisation, intersectional urban experiences, slavery, political participation, and religion.