Taylor 2016

Taylor, Jesse Oak. The Sky of Our Manufacture: the London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf. Virginia: UP, 2016. Print.

Intro

• 5: Nature in the Anthroposcene exists in a state of perpetual withdrawal, a state of affairs that I have taken to calling "abnatural". The prefix ab- means both "away from" and "derived from." Thus, "abnatural" speaks to both nature's absence and its uncanny persistence.... Abnatural characterizes those moments in which nature appears other to itself, beside or outside itself.

Ch. 1: Bleak House

• 21: [Esther and Guppy coming into a "London particular"] What does it mean to imagine a manufactured climate? How do we dwell, meaningfully and coherently, in an abnatural world? These are questions of urgent, twenty-first-century significance, but they are also questions that we share with the Victorians.... Treating Victorian literature as Anthroposcene literature offers a paradoxically new perspective on the present, reminding us that we inhabit the future: we live after the end of the world to which our bodies, appetites, and ideas are adapted, in a state of perpetual withdrawal from the world we once called home, even as many of the species with which we cohabit the planet disappear entirely.
• 23: Drawing a correlation between realist fiction and the glasshouse suggests that we understand Victorian realism as a distinct participation in "environmentalism," in the nineteenth-century sense of the term, which James Winter has described as "an interpretative framework: the proposition that crucial aspects of human life and history are determined by distinct physical settings." Instead of expressing explicit concern about the vulnerability of the natural world, environmentalism offered the Victorians a mechanism for understanding the relationship between the human species and its habitat in dynamic interaction.