Allegories of the Anthropocene

“Allegories of the Anthropocene is a book of oceanic reach, in every sense. Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey's transformative thinking will reverberate across the environmental humanities, postcolonial studies, and the Anthropocene debates for many years to come.” - Rob Nixon, author of Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor

“Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey is one on the world’s leading authorities of island cultures and imaginaries in the context of modern imperial history and of economic and environmental globalization more generally. Her innovative, indispensable, and inventive book, Allegories of the Anthropocene, will immediately become a must-read in the environmental humanities, taking its place as an instant classic.” - Joni Adamson, Professor and Director of the Environmental Humanities Initiative, Arizona State University

"DeLoughrey brings her considerable background in environmental humanities and postcolonial literature studies to bear in this volume. . . . This book is not to be missed by those interested in keeping up with recent conversations, across the environmental humanities, around issues of the Anthropocene." - L. C. Bayne, Choice

“Allegoriesof the Anthropocene brings human histories of dispossession, toxicity, and creative survival to the fore where they might get lost in the geologic fixation on sediment. . . .  It is powerful that this rich and careful book should end with a turn to the reader, showing how allegory at its most potent is about the entanglement, not leap, between part/whole or island/planet.” - Isabel Lockhart, Journal of British Studies

"By decolonising geological discourse, as well as scholarship about climate change more broadly, Allegories of the Anthropocene challenges climate change epistemologies and realities to illuminate the continued, violent atmospheric changes confronting spaces formerly colonised as the consequence of their imperial and military repression and exploitation." - Giulia Champion, Ecozon@

“DeLoughrey’s new book is to be strongly recommended for its highly original tack: focusing upon the rising importance of allegory as a way of making sense of times of rupture and catastrophic environmental change.” - Jonathan Pugh, Island Studies Journal

“Whenever Elizabeth DeLoughrey makes a critical intervention within a specific theoretical or literary field, established certainties, or matters of general consensus, seem suddenly in need of recalibration…. Allegories of the Anthropocene does something similar to the overburdened discourse surrounding the proposed geological epoch…. Like an exciting crossword puzzle, the book is delightfully difficult as it deconstructs the complexities and inconsistencies of the Anthropocene discourse.” - Malcolm Sen, New West Indian Guide

“This is a meticulously researched, compellingly argued and richly suggestive book that builds on various strands in DeLoughrey’s previous research to produce an important and timely intervention into ecocritical, indigenous and literary / visual studies. DeLoughrey has an enviable ability to summarize and synthesize enormous bodies of scholarship across multiple disciplines, and to bring them into productive relation, also deploying highly nuanced close reading skills in relating (social) scientific discourses to specific literary, artistic and filmic ‘texts.’” - Michelle Keown, Literary Research

“[DeLoughrey] shows how thinking beyond the Anthropocene . . . is now required. Then, evoking striking examples from poetry, literature, art, and philosophy, she demonstrates that allegory has been pervasive in modern times and that it remains pointedly relevant to creativity in our contemporary situation.” - Terry Smith, Art Bulletin

“Allegories of the Anthropocene is a resounding success, one that promises to reframe and reshape the environmental humanities for decades to come.” - Jonathan Elmore, Modern Fiction Studies

“The counter-canon of literature from the oceanic global South assembled by Allegories of the Anthropocene is perhaps this book’s most unexpected gift. . . . DeLoughrey quietly generates over the course of her volume a treasure trove of texts by indigenous island writers that are little known and seldom studied or taught.” - Michelle Burnham, American Literary History