On the Late Style of a Species: Confronting Eco-Anxiety in the Poetry of Toru Dutt and Emily Brontë

Abstract

This thesis looks to the nineteenth century as a point of early speculation and dread over the fate of fossil-fueled society. Until recently, literary criticism has occupied itself in the speculative mode, but since the American Psychological Association’s definition and mainstream coverage of the phenomenon of eco-anxiety, however, ecocritical discourse appears to be shifting into a new stage, one in which anticipation is relegated to the past tense, and the question of how climate collapse will look in the future has evolved into a question of how we deal with it now that we’re in its midst. Closely examining the poetry of Toru Dutt and Emily Brontë as case studies in the manifestation of eco-anxiety in Victorian poetry, this thesis argues for the integration of affect theory, and specifically trauma theory, into ecocritical discourse.