Corbin Hiday
Resident Graduate Scholar
Department of English
About
‘Probable Exhaustion': Empire's Environments and the Poetics of Extraction
My dissertation explores the consequences of what I read as a fundamental contradiction of the emergent "fossil economy" in the nineteenth-century: narratives of imagined progress constitutively entail the limits of exhaustion. While I borrow this framework from political economy and debates surrounding the Victorian "coal question," I turn to a series of fictional narratives as they enact what I name a poetics of extraction, entailing tropes and figures that distort and amplify an ideology of endless progress. Mobilizing a transhistorical lens and transnational archive, I argue that an environmental crisis in the present necessitates an examination of its foundations in the expanded extractive practices of the nineteenth-century--the period in which the bourgeois novel emerged as the privileged site of cultural expression and a system of extraction became globalized through empire.