Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion

How literature of the British imperial world contended with the social and environmental consequences of industrial mining

The 1830s to the 1930s saw the rise of large-scale industrial mining in the British imperial world. Elizabeth Carolyn Miller examines how literature of this era reckoned with a new vision of civilization where humans are dependent on finite, nonrenewable stores of earthly resources, and traces how the threatening horizon of resource exhaustion worked its way into narrative form.

Britain was the first nation to transition to industry based on fossil fuels, which put its novelists and other writers in the remarkable position of mediating the emergence of extraction-based life. Miller looks at works like Hard Times, The Mill on the Floss, and Sons and Lovers, showing how the provincial realist novel’s longstanding reliance on marriage and inheritance plots transforms against the backdrop of exhaustion to withhold the promise of reproductive futurity. She explores how adventure stories like Treasure Island and Heart of Darkness reorient fictional space toward the resource frontier. And she shows how utopian and fantasy works like “Sultana’s Dream,” The Time Machine, and The Hobbit offer imaginative ways of envisioning energy beyond extractivism.

This illuminating book reveals how an era marked by violent mineral resource rushes gave rise to literary forms and genres that extend extractivism as a mode of environmental understanding.

"“Miller shows how the idea of extraction came to structure certain genres of the nineteenth century, and how those forms have made it easier for us to accept the world’s continued inertia regarding the extractive and environmental crises of today.”—Kent Linthicum, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment "

"“Miller argues that the extractive industries of metal, mineral and coal mining altered literary genre and form and vice versa, showing ‘how culture, language, and discourse mediate environmental history’ . . . She works through literary and scientific texts to build an image of a shift in understanding of the British Empire, one which increasingly relied on and feared the limits of extractive industry.”—Indigo Gray, Green Letters "

""Important and illuminating. . . . Extraction Ecologies contributes a compelling new framework for understanding how the environmental crises we grapple with today cannot adequately be understood without attending to their Victorian origins.” –Jayne Hildebrand, Nineteenth-Century Literature "

"“Brilliantly thought out, wonderfully well written, and extremely well executed. . . . Extraction Ecologies is a much-needed panoramic tour of the long nineteenth century’s large-scale industrial extraction that digs into the historical roots of our current ecological calamities. It should be a major reference for students and scholars in Victorian studies, energy humanities, and ecocriticism in years to come.” —Sebastian Egholm Lund, Victorian Review "

"A rich and moving contribution. . . . [Miller’s] book will become essential reading for scholars of the very long nineteenth century and an invaluable resource for those seeking new ways to teach that literature to students whose lives are taking shape in the inescapable context of accelerating climate change."---Iain Crawford, Dickens Quarterly

"[A] well-research work. . . . Miller’s groundbreaking study of 'extractive fictions' sets the stage for more research on how literature reflects the perils and short-sightedness of an age."

"This is a major book that will invite scholars of the period to think in new ways about “extractivism,” while also showing how vital historical interpretation is to the environmental and energy humanities, fields that have predominantly focused on contemporary culture."---Benjamin Morgan, Critical Inquiry

"A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year"

"Honorable Mention for the Ecocriticism Book Award, Association for the Study of Literature and Environment"

"Co-Winner of the Stansky Prize, North American Conference on British Studies"

“Elizabeth Carolyn Miller’s delineation of a ‘literature of exhaustion’ provides an indispensable frame for studying nineteenth-century literature. Focusing on texts on and from various locations, she brings together an imaginative range of materials and reads them in ways that are brilliant, unexpected, and refreshing. There is no way to overstate the importance of this book.”—Sukanya Banerjee, author of Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late-Victorian Empire

“This is a magnificent book. Miller’s deft readings are substantial and illuminating, and the range of literary examples is fantastic. I will never look at adventure fiction or buried treasure the same way again.”—Jesse Oak Taylor, author of The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf

“Miller shows how keenly aware Victorians were of the manifold ways in which ordinary life was utterly dependent on a finite and dwindling stock of material resources. This lucid and persuasive book is essential for readers who want to understand how literary culture was shaped by the realities of a new world economy set on ecologically unsustainable foundations.”—Allen MacDuffie, author of Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination