Introduction

Summary

Drawing attention to the Anthropocene as both proposed geological epoch and discourse about the Earth’s future, the Introduction examines the Anthropocene’s challenge to the value of literature and literary criticism and the opportunity it offers to reinvigorate both. It works from and summarises the chapters in the book while highlighting arguments and perspectives from Anthropocene studies in literature and environmental humanities. Citing diverse writers, it argues that literature can deploy its unique practices (narrative, poetics, etc.) and faculty for imagining the future towards an understanding of humans’ interconnection with the Earth that the Anthropocene demands; and that it can best do so by adapting and evolving those practices towards sharing divergent experiences (e.g. stories of people and species disseminated online) and, via (say) experimental poetry or elongated narrative, relating human beings to exponentially vaster scales: deep history, Earth, the distant future. The Introduction concludes with a case study of Chile which underlines literature's and culture’s value in mediating the complex social, cultural and ontological questions that the Anthropocene poses.