Scale, Crisis, and the Modern Novel
Extreme Measures

An examination of how four industrial-age novelists confronted crises at new and unprecedented temporal, ecological and geographical scales.

Aaron Rosenberg (Author)

9781009271776, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 9 November 2023

208 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 1.7 cm, 0.44 kg

At the turn of the twentieth century, novelists faced an unprecedented crisis of scale. While exponential increases in industrial production, resource extraction, and technological complexity accelerated daily life, growing concerns about deep time, evolution, globalization, and extinction destabilised scale's value as a measure of reality. Here, Aaron Rosenberg examines how four novelists moved radically beyond novelistic realism, repurposing the genres-romance, melodrama, gothic, and epic-it had ostensibly superseded. He demonstrates how H. G. Wells, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, and Virginia Woolf engaged with climatic and ecological crises that persist today, requiring us to navigate multiple temporal and spatial scales simultaneously. The volume shows that problems of scale constrain our responses to crisis by shaping the linguistic, aesthetic, and narrative structures through which we imagine it. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

Introduction: extreme measures
1. Rescaling Romance: H. G. Wells
2. Infinitesimal lives: Thomas Hardy's scale effects
3. Joseph Conrad and the scalability of Empire
4. Virginia Woolf and the problem of generations
Conclusion: welcome to the Psychozoic.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]