Chapter 4 examines Naipaul’s engagement with the legacy of slavery beginning with The Loss of El Dorado (1969), a remarkable example of a novelistic rendition of historical events based on Naipaul’s reading of nightmarish primary documents relating to the colonization of the West Indies and littoral Latin America. What surfaced in the creative history that he wrote is a narrative of failures and failed, egotistical heroes, and administrators who, living out their own fantasies, saw nothing aberrant in their treatment of the slaves they traumatized and condemned, and the Indians they dispossessed and then killed off. Before The Loss of El Dorado, Naipaul had written his first travel book, The Middle Passage (1962), also discussed in this chapter. Naipaul returns to the theme twenty-five years later in A Way in the World (1994). The chapter examines the disturbing novel Guerrillas (1975), a dark book about fantasy-driven Black Power enthusiasts and, given the historical connections between Spanish and English slavery, a work on the American South, A Turn in the South (1989). The chapter makes the case that to Naipaul nations fail when they do not fully come to terms with their history.

Before his commission to illustrate Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Fritz Eichenberg (1901–90) had neither read the novel nor been to Britain. To illustrate it from New York and in the middle of World War II, he imaginatively occupied Jane’s lucid gaze. Brontë’s first-person account seems so profoundly personal that many Victorian readers thought that, as its subtitle “An Autobiography” suggested, it must be a memoir. Woolf said that to write down one’s impressions of the novel year after year would be tantamount to recording the story of one’s life. The same could be said of illustrating it. Eichenberg had fled Berlin for New York with his Jewish family in 1933, motivated by fear of retribution for his anti-Hitler cartoons. As he immersed himself in visualizing Jane’s voice, and shaping his figures, background, and compositions around her perspective, he overlaid his experience of flight, emigration, and movement onto Jane’s. His gouging, roughly hewn engravings are a self-portrait, narrativized not by his life events but by Jane’s. His Jane Eyre is also telling of a culture of collection and ownership; the Book-of-the-Month Club distributed his edition to subscribers.

This part of the book considers how to study the work of a poet. It uses the poets Emily Brontë and Srinivas Rayaprol as case studies to illustrate how to build up a picture of a poet’s career, how to get to grips with their central interests and their ways of addressing them, and how to develop a response to a writer in the context of the broader critical debate around their work.

Legends about the vampire and the development of Gothic fiction took separate tracks throughout the eighteenth century in England and the rest of Europe. But they united decisively in S. T. Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ (composed 1799–1800; published 1816), which then inspired the more symbolic uses of the vampire-figure in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819). These works showed that the vampire could be a symbolic site for ‘abjecting’ (in Julia Kristeva’s sense of ‘throwing-off’) the most feared inconsistencies and conflicts at the heart of individuals and their whole culture. From there, this mating of fictive schemes, empowered by the Janus-faced nature of Gothic symbol-making, proliferated across the nineteenth century in plays, penny dreadfuls and fully-fledged novels. As these versions of the Gothic vampire progressed, so the range of deep conflicts that this figure could abject, individual and social, grew exponentially, as we can still see in texts ranging from Sir Walter Scott’s novels and Charles Nodier’s French plays in the 1810s and 1820s to Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire in the 1890s.

The poet and academic Sarah Corbett reveals Plath’s profound response to Yorkshire’s powerful and often threatening natural and human landscape, as well as to the writings of Emily Brontë and Ted Hughes. In a handful of poems, Plath can be heard sounding out a Hughesian strain of voice against the ghosts and rumoured angels of her own emergent poetic imagination. These West Yorkshire interludes show Plath making use of an ambivalent energy in the landscape to mirror her self/psyche, a technique that can be seen in many of the Ariel poems, and the beginnings of a working out of the struggle between masculine and feminine voices that was to underpin much of her mature work.

Atmosphere is both a literal aspect of the Earth system and a formal property of literary texts. This chapter takes up that double-meaning of the term. Taking the description of atmospheric phenomena in literature seriously helps illustrate the expansive entanglement between climate and human history, revealing changing attitudes to climate across time. At the same time, attending to formal atmosphere helps illustrate literature’s capacity to mediate, and symptomatise, climatic history and its impacts upon culture in ways that extend beyond description to include character formation, book production, and textual studies, while also elevating the importance of setting as both physical location and formal property. The chapter also expands our consideration of setting to include sites of reading along with those of composition or narration. Utilising Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights as a case study, the chapter advocates a mode of reading that situates literary history within the history Earth system, which is to say the study of the planet as a single, interconnected whole.

Over the past decade, anthropogenic climate change has encouraged authors and readers to confront new modes of imagining time, selfhood, and narrative and to reassess the relationships among experiential, historical, and climatological time. In Western literary culture, historical and climatological time traditionally have seemed one and the same. Working within the 5000-year time frame of biblical history, writers envisioned a world that, since the sixth day of creation, always has been inhabited and therefore always had been shaped and reshaped by humans. In this worldview, ‘nature’ is always a product of anthropogenic intervention. Beginning around 1800, however, work in geology, planetary astronomy, and palaeontology transformed conceptions of climate by decoupling planetary history from human experience, memory, and myth. In giving narrative form to the collision of experiential and climatological time, Anthropocene fiction explores the problem that science fiction often seems more ‘realistic’ than traditional narrative realism.