Table Of ContentThe Anthropocene Lyric
DOI: 10.1057/9781137364753.0001
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DOI: 10.1057/9781137364753.0001
The Anthropocene
Lyric: An Affective
Geography of Poetry,
Person, Place
Tom Bristow
University of Melbourne, Australia
DOI: 10.1057/9781137364753.0001
© Tom Bristow 2015
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-36474-6
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
publication may be made without written permission.
No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted
save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence
permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency,
Saff ron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.
Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
Th e author has asserted his right to be identifi ed as the author of this work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2015 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
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registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire RG21 6XS.
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Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
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Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN:978-1-137-36475-3 PDF
ISBN:978-1-349-57397-4
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
www.palgrave.com/pivot
DOI: 10.1057/9781137364753
This book is dedicated to Andrea Curtis
DOI: 10.1057/9781137364753.0001
Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction 1
Affective geography: poetry, person, place 2
Locating poetry in the Anthropocene 3
Ecopoetics and geocriticism 4
Place perception 5
More-than-human worlds 6
Anthropocene emotion 7
A different literary geography:
earth scripts 8
Literature and space 9
After Marxist geography 11
An Anthropocene paradigm of
place-based personhood 12
Anthropocene counterpoint 15
A renewed poetics of place 18
1 Jam Tree Gully 19
Affective geography: a preface 21
Attributes and affects: minority
geographies 23
The world of the jam tree 23
D ecolonised pastoral 24
Location as focal point 26
Thresholds of knowing 29
‘My plastic emotions’ or not ideas about
things 32
Affective arrays 33
Negative dialectics and a sacred kingfisher 34
vi DOI: 10.1057/9781137364753.0001
Contents vii
Warped empathy and radical pastoral 37
Discordant harmonies 39
E nvironmental empathy 40
A salutary conclusion 44
2 Gift Songs 47
The inscape of dialogical poetics: a prelude on place 49
Contextualising Burnside 51
Geography and the idea of order 53
Spatial spontaneity 53
Generative worlds; language and place 56
Urban history 57
The itinerant ‘I’ 58
Psychogeograpy and spirited materialism 62
Varieties of religious experience (1) 65
Stoical neighbourliness 65
Ecopoetic liturgy 67
Varieties of religious experience (2) 68
One enormous household: Rilkean hues 69
The situated creaturely life 71
A sanguine conclusion 75
3 A Sleepwalk on the Severn 77
Modulated uncountry: a prologue 80
Forming environmentally: the locus of labour 82
Environmental affect 84
Struggling for form 87
Spatialised struggle 89
Place-consciousness 91
Withness 93
Footholds 94
Belonging 97
Transformative poetics 97
Living bodies 98
Walking 99
An affective habitus 100
The corporealised imaginary 101
S ubluminary habitus 102
Situated voices 103
A provisional conclusion 105
DOI: 10.1057/9781137364753.0001
viii Contents
Conclusion 107
Poems of our climate 108
A word on history 109
A note on belonging 110
A sketch of selfhood 111
Reflections on Anthropocene personhood 113
Territory (as situatedness) 115
Estrangement (as settledness) 119
Identification (as discreteness) 120
Where next for the lyric imagination? 122
Glossary 124
Bibliography 130
Index 138
DOI: 10.1057/9781137364753.0001
Acknowledgements
The author acknowledges the following publications in
which some arguments of The Anthropocene Lyric first
appeared, sometimes in a slightly different form: Aus-
tralasian Journal of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology; Green
Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism; Scottish Literary Review;
Symbiosis: A Journal of Transatlantic Literary and Cultural
Relations; and Transnational Literature.
The Anthropocene Lyric is the result of four months’
work. It was drafted during a writing retreat at Kioloa
Coastal Campus of the Australian National University
(2013); the copy was revised during a research fellowship
at the Humanities Research Centre, Australian National
University (2014), and while I was a visiting lecturer in the
Department of English, University of British Columbia
(2014). I would like to thank the Australian National
University, the Australian Research Council Centre of
Excellence for the History of Emotions, the Edith and
Joy London Foundation, and the University of British
Columbia.
This book would not have been possible without the
assistance and encouragement of Sophie Ainscough,
Xanthe Ashburner, Tully Barnett, Robyn Bartel, Ruth Blair,
David Borthwick, John Burnside, Sally Bushell, Richard
Cavell, David Cooper, Charles Dawson, Thom van Dooren,
Benjamin Doyle, Sumathi Ellappan, Rachel Fensham,
Henning Fjørtoft, Louisa Gairn, Debjani Ganguly, Greg
Garrard, Paul Gibbard, Alan Gillis, Stephen Guy-Bray,
Stephen Harris, Barbara Holloway, Greg Horsley, Graham
Huggan, Tony Hughes-d’Aeth, Vidhya Jayaprakash, John
DOI: 10.1057/9781137364753.0002 ix
