Changing the Climate at the Fin de Siecle

During the nineteenth century, a plethora of literary authors began imagining that humanity could affect the global climate. Paradoxically, they did this not through the scientific paradigm of global warming, but its perverse inverse: climate control. Rigorously contextualized by the climate events, science, and technology of the nineteenth century, this study compares how canonical figures such as Mark Twain and neglected authors such as Rokeya Hossain represented global climate control as an apocalyptic, utopian, and literary invention. It argues that these authors expressed a shift to an Anthropocene awareness not through prophetic representations of catastrophic change but rather through Promethean fantasies of control. Revelatory for scholars working in both nineteenth-century studies and the environmental humanities, this is the story of the progressive inscription of atmospheric control into ensuing Western modernism and modernity long before the advent of 'global warming'.