Scale Crisis and the Modern Novel

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moved radically beyond novelistic realism repurposing the genres-romance melodrama gothic and epic-it had ostensibly superseded.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.