Victorian Studies in the Anthropocene: An Interview with Claire Colebrook

Abstract

In this interview, Claire Colebrook discusses the implications of the Anthropocene for Victorian literature — and, by extension, for the field of Victorian studies — as well as literary history and critical theory more broadly. A literary scholar by training, with a focus on Romanticism, Colebrook is now a leading figure in Anthropocene studies, and her work in this field examines how climate change forces us to reassess the modes of thinking upon which we have come to rely in the humanities. In this provocative discussion, Colebrook addresses the ways in which the Anthropocene might be traced back through Romantic and Victorian poetry, the emergence of post-apocalyptic narratives in the nineteenth century, the challenges posed to feminism by planetary destruction, and the humanities’ complicity with ecological degradation.