Race In Nineteenth-Century Literatures and Cultures- Poetry Cosmologies of the Human

Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Cosmologies of the Human shows how nineteenth-century lyric poetry helped naturalize the idea of white colonial man as both the default human subject and a geologic force. Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Cosmologies of the Human traces how lyric entanglements of human and nonhuman—often regarded as benign or reparative—have underwritten violent projects of planetary world-building whose consequences persist well into the present day. Situating poets and theorists of poetry such as William Wordsworth, John Stuart Mill, John Ruskin, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Phillis Wheatley in dialogue with writings on the intersections of race and environment by the Comte de Buffon, Charles Lyell, Robert Knox, and Immanuel Kant, Devin M. Garofalo excavates a Romantic and Victorian verse tradition that renders Earth in the likeness of a purportedly universal but fundamentally white colonial subject. This anthropomorphized Earth, Garofalo argues, finds its aesthetic foundation in nineteenth-century "lyric manscapes": poetic worlds that terraform the planet in accordance with racialized ideas of human difference. Far from opposing environmental harm, these forms often reproduce the very racial logics that animate ecocide itself, even when poets appear to lament environmental loss. Drawing on Sylvia Wynter's work on race, nature, and power, Garofalo complicates simplified narratives of the Anthropocene by demonstrating how human domination is sometimes asserted through, rather than against, the Earth. Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Cosmologies of the Human undertakes direct confrontations with the racialized assumptions embedded in standard practices of reading Romantic and Victorian poetries. Refracting Wheatley's heterocosmic and allusive praxis across the archive of this book, Garofalo advances an unsentimental mode of salvage criticism, testing ambivalence as a readerly disposition attuned to Earth's pluriversal scales and to an interhuman reimagining of nineteenth-century literary studies.