Long 19th-century British and Interdisciplinary Humanities panel session
58th northeast mla (Nemla) annual conference
newport, rhode island
march 6-9, 2027

 Abstract Deadline: 

Weather in 19 th-Century Literature and Art in the Age of the Anthropocene

Panel Chair: Dewey W. Hall, Ph.D.

Weather in 19th-century Literature and Art in the Age of the Anthropocene concerns the question of evidence of weather-related changes due to anthropogenic emissions induced, in part, by industrial capitalism. The issue centers on the extent to which man-made emissions as well as volcanic emissions contributed to the rise of the Anthropocene during the 19th -century. While humanity has been considered to be largely responsible for weather-related changes regarding shifts in wind current patterns, varying levels of precipitation, and drought-like conditions induced by an increase in anthropogenic emissions, leading Paul Crutzen to declare a new geologic epoch in Cuernavaca, Mexico (2000) during a gathering of atmospheric chemists, the conditions continued to be exacerbated by the close of the 19 th-century.

In recent years, numerous studies have emerged correlating the Anthropocene to industrial capitalism, documenting the increasing carbon footprint. Several of which include Jeremy Davies’s Birth of the Anthropocene (2016), Jesse Oak Taylor and Tobias Menely’s volume Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times (2017), Pieter Vermulen’s Literature and the Anthropocene (2020), and Seth Reno’s Early Anthropocene Literature in Britain, 1750–1884 (2021) among other publications. Many of the aforementioned studies and beyond focus on the negative effects upon the environs, which implicate human activity evident through humanity’s imprint upon lithostratigraphic records whether through glacier recession, soil erosion, declining high water marks, and so on as well dendrochronological study of growth rings in tree trunks, reflecting the changing weather conditions.

A variety of writers and artists documented the effects due, in part to a great extent, to the anthropogenic activity, which may include the sky watchers identified, but are not limited to the following.

In literary studies, one might think of literary and non-literary records:

• Luke Howard’s Essays on the Modifications of Clouds (1803)
• William Wordsworth's Lucy poems (1798) and “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” (1807)
• George Gordon, Lord Byron's "Darkness" (1816)
• Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “The Cloud” (1820), “To a Skylark” (1820), & “Ode to the West Wind” (1820)
• John Ruskin's "The 'Storm-Cloud' of the Nineteenth Century" (1884)

In visual art, a host of artists captured the meteorological changes and the sky-altering effects:

• Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818)
• J.M.W. Turner's atmospheric watercolor paintings (1818–1830)
• John Constable’s oil paintings/sketches in Hampstead, London (1821–1822)
• Thomas Cole’s cloud studies (1838)
• Vincent Van Gogh’s Wheatfield with Cypresses (1889)

The panel invites cross-disciplinary humanities papers that may delve into literary studies, history of art, geology, industrialism, volcanology, and, of course, meteorology, focusing on weather as recorded in literary and visual art. For consideration, please submit an abstract (200-250 words) and biography (100 words) through the NeMLA portal: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/22517.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact Dewey W. Hall, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona at dwhall@cpp.edu.

Image Source: Wanderer above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich, 1818