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Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment Advance Access originally published online on July 28, 2009
Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 2009 16(3):429-441; doi:10.1093/isle/isp061
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© The Author(s) 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Renaissance Literature and Our Contemporary Attitude toward Global Warming

Ken Hiltner

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

The manner by which industrial air pollution emerges as an issue of discussion in seventeenth-century England can—as unlikely as it may seem—tell us much about our present attitude toward the causes of global warming. In fact, as I hope to make clear in this essay, we risk misunderstanding these causes if we do not consider a troubling representational challenge faced by Renaissance writers, which, still with us today, may be distorting our understanding of the causes of our present environmental crisis.

While human beings have been burning fossil fuels for thousands of years, early modern Londoners, having centuries before deforested the area surrounding their city, were almost exclusively burning a particularly dangerous form of highly sulfurous coal that created in both scope and type a problem that had not been encountered before. As seventeenth-century England was mining three to four times more coal than the rest of Europe combined, much . . . [Full Text of this Article]


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