Dissertation

Our Ice Age

The Geohistorical Imagination in the Northern Hemisphere

“Our Ice Age” addresses the contemporary significance of Earth’s history by focusing on representations of the last ice age, a relatively recent geological moment that began 2.5 million years ago and ended at the close of the Pleistocene epoch. Relying on methods developed within environmental and historicist literary criticism, this dissertation follows the ice age imaginary across Europe, North America, and Siberia from its origins in the nineteenth century to the present. Throughout these different historical and cultural circumstances, the ice age has served, and continues to serve, as a privileged locus for writers and scientists to wrestle with the historicity of the nonhuman world and our relationship to it. Through an engagement with the ice age’s various narrative emplotments, this dissertation shows how the deep past remains relevant, not merely in the sense that geological forces—like orbital cycles and expanding ice sheets—persist, but also because stories about the Earth’s history continue to inform the science and politics of anthropogenic global warming today. 

This research contributes to the environmental humanities by taking seriously the idea that climate change and the Anthropocene require us to think historically in radically expanded ways. Where most recent studies of climate change, literature, and culture focus exclusively on the relatively recent past—looking back to the great acceleration in the middle of the twentieth century or the industrial revolution—“Our Ice Age” resists this essentially human-centered bias by digging into the planet’s deeper history. Analyzing both scientific and literary objects within this new interpretive horizon, this research fosters a significantly expanded purview of literary analysis and points toward the relevance of deep history for a more sustainable future.