Romance in the Anthropocene: Climates of Form in the 19th Century

This paper examines the intersections between early anthropogenic climate change and one of the literary genres most vital to the American Renaissance, which was itself a movement contemporaneous with the global dawn of... [ view full abstract ]

This paper examines the intersections between early anthropogenic climate change and one of the literary genres most vital to the American Renaissance, which was itself a movement contemporaneous with the global dawn of mankind’s measurable impact on the environment. The romance—conceived in the regional cradle of US industrialization (New England and, more specifically, Massachusetts) and theorized across the prefaces to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s four major works—famously prioritizes atmosphere in both a literal and metaphorical sense, insisting on its crucial importance at the original moment of its heightened vulnerability to human influence. By distinguishing it from the novel on the basis of its formal dependence on “the clouds overhead,” Hawthorne emphasizes romance’s light mimetic footprint: it is dedicated to building “castles in the air” rather than treading on “actual soil.” At the same time, romance has concrete meteorological sensitivities: it thrives best, for instance, in Italy’s warm, arid “clime.” In this paper, I argue that romance’s aerial qualities are not merely figurative—insofar as it focuses on the marvelous, as opposed to the terrestrial—but actually anticipate the ways in which the acceleration of geological time would eventually destroy the synonymity between the ordinary and the predictable, rendering the fabulous mundane. The “ruin” necessary for romance to “grow,” then, is not only the solid architectural remnants of past civilizations whose dry chinks and crevices provide fertile ground for pioneer species such as “lichens,” but the dim presentiment of an apocalyptic future in which “realism” and “romance” will become commensurate with one another (and those who seek consolation in this type of fiction may no longer be “short-lived creature(s)” on the verge of extinction).