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Author ORCID Identifier
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8832-2968
AccessType
Campus-Only Access for Five (5) Years
Document Type
dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Degree Program
English
Year Degree Awarded
2022
Month Degree Awarded
May
First Advisor
Jane Hwang Degenhardt
Second Advisor
Joseph Black
Third Advisor
Jean Feerick
Fourth Advisor
Marjorie Rubright
Fifth Advisor
Maria Barbon
Subject Categories
Literature in English, Anglophone outside British Isles and North America
Abstract
Saturnine Ecologies explores the representation of environmental catastrophe through a diverse archive of early modern poetry, dramas, paintings, and historiographies. It offers historically-conscious, phenomenologically-grounded analysis of scenes where characters endure, witness, narrate, or reflect on environmental catastrophe. This shifts attention from the field of theory and ideology, to the felt experiential immediacy of environmental catastrophe. The chapters are gathered under four terms—precarity, capacity, salvage, and consolation—which throw into relief the myriad ways that the early moderns made meaning from catastrophe. Readers, as well, were invited to try out these representational practices. For instance, the blank spaces within the pages of the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s Royal Commentaries—the first work of history published by an indigenous author—enabled readers to revise and expand on the environmental and colonial histories compiled there. This work argues that the literature of environmental catastrophe always brings the past to bear on the now—and give us strategies to create livable lives in the aftermath of our own climate emergency.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.7275/28591572
Recommended Citation
Yargo, John, "SATURNINE ECOLOGIES: ENVIRONMENTAL CATASTROPHE IN THE EARLY MODERN WORLD, 1542-1688" (2022). Doctoral Dissertations. 2584.
https://doi.org/10.7275/28591572
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/2584