H. G. Wells’s novel, The First Men in the Moon (1901), presents a cogent and sustained challenge to the supremacy of empire, and does so from the standpoint of astronomy and the increasing knowledge of the heavens by the end of the nineteenth century. This planetary moment in early modernist writing signals a critical tradition of planetary consciousness that links astronomical research to critiques of capitalism. This chapter asks how Wells’s proto-modernist aesthetic (often occluded by his popular and romantic strains) co-emerges with a critique of imperialism sharpened by the new time and space scales of the globe(s) that emerge at the turn of the last century, to form a planetary prose.

H. G. Wells and Planetary Prose

The Evolution of Point of View

Abstract:Since the first wave of Wellsian scholarship emerged in the 1960s, The Time Machine has been interpreted in light of H.G. Wells's various scientific obsessions, resulting in a wealth of interdisciplinary studies that have probed the relationship between the author's early fiction and Victorian science. Yet despite the critical consensus that the author's work incorporated insights culled from modern science in significant ways, scholars have not done enough to examine how Wells's wide-ranging early engagements with the sciences were often underwritten by a single conceptual concern: the speculative possibility of human extinction. Reading key fictional and non-fictional documents from the author's Victorian period, and culminating in an in-depth analysis that situates The Time Machine as a response to Edward Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race, this essay argues that scholars have not only failed to reckon with the centrality of human extinction to Wells's work and thought but have also tended to ignore the tragic dimensions that undergird his early writing, often despite explicit evidence that Wells viewed his fiction as contributing to the tragic mode. Working against this tendency, this essay argues that Wells offers a revised, post-Darwinian form of tragedy that directly confronts the existential precarity of the human species.

“The Pitiless Judgement of Time”: Human Extinction in the Evolutionary Tragedies of H.G. Wells

Abstract:Where in the realm of the sensible can we locate the impact of large-scale anthropogenic processes on biodiversity? In this article I develop a critical approach I term "biocultural phenomenology," focusing upon the intersection of ecological crisis and literary form. I read psychological and social realisms by Henry James and H. G. Wells for instances of small-scale, granular sensations of widening access to imperial and settler-colonial practices of consumption, prevalent forms of bourgeois sociality, and emerging patterns of feeling. I argue that "everyday" and often mundane feelings that are the focus of dominant strands of historical realism are inextricable from the biocide they produce. This article engages ongoing conversations in environmental humanities and novel studies, current styles of critique, and identifies new possibilities for the history of realism. First, biocultural phenomenology displaces affective responses of mourning and ontological accounts of absence governing conversations about literary form and anthropogenic impacts on nonhuman life. Second, I argue that realist logics in these highly anthropocentric texts that appear superficially unpromising for environmental thought nevertheless bind accounts of phenomenal experiences to emergent systemic behaviors across time. Third, I reframe the critical category of the "everyday" in the history of realism to encompass global multispecies impacts and accreting, complex causal structures across very long timescales.

Aaron Rosenberg

Papers

Romancing the Anthropocene: H. G. Wells and the Genre of the Future