Fin du Globe: On Decadent Planets

Abstract

As scholars across disciplines have turned their attention to the climate crisis, they have developed expanded critical frameworks—most notably, the Anthropocene—that aspire to understand a new planetary scale of human agency and to situate human history in relation to geological time. This essay argues that the literature of British decadence, which often contemplated the eventual ends of the planet and of the human species, offers resources for refining contemporary thought about planetary and temporal scale. Focusing on the Caribbean writer M. P. Shiel, the essay traces how decadent writing both reveals planetary scales to be irreducibly multiple and exposes a basic antinomy of scalar expansion: for decadents—as for us—to view the Earth and its history in their totality is also to witness their eventual disintegration.

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