The Victorian Pre-History of Climate Denial: A Closer Look at VIC 60.4

This post is part of a series that takes a closer look at the scholarship behind IU Press Journals. Primarily written by journal editors and contributors, posts may respond to articles, provide background, document the development process, or explain why scholars are excited about the journal, theme, or article.

Allen MacDuffie’s article, “Charles Darwin and the Victorian Pre-History of Climate Denial,” from Victorian Studies newest issue is now available on JSTOR & Project MUSE. Below, guest editor Elizabeth Carolyn Miller elaborates on the historical roots of “soft denial.”

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In "Charles Darwin and the Victorian Pre-History of Climate Denial," Allen MacDuffie tracks our widespread contemporary mood of "soft denialism" -- where we rationally accept the truth of climate change yet compartmentalize that truth and live as if it were not so -- back to the nineteenth century and its response to the work of Charles Darwin. Evolutionary theory struck at the heart of human existential susceptibilities, producing the same kinds of cognitive dissonance that characterize life today under climate change. Examining literary work by Alfred Tennyson, H.G. Wells, and Joseph Conrad, MacDuffie shows how everyday life, for these authors, took on qualities of artifice and disavowal as they grappled with the aftershocks of the Darwinian revolution.

Elizabeth Carolyn Miller is guest editor of the latest issue of Victorian Studies: Climate Change and Victorian Studies. She is also Professor of English at the University of California, Davis.

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More from Victorian Studies 60.4

Climate Change and Victorian Studies: Introduction
Elizabeth Carolyn Miller

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Charles Darwin and the Victorian Pre-History of Climate Denial
Allen MacDuffie

Slow Causality: The Function of Narrative in an Age of Climate Change
Tina Young Choi and Barbara Leckie

Industrial Souls: Climate Change, Immorality, and Victorian Anticipations of the Good Anthropocene
Heidi C. M. Scott

Petrodrama: Melodrama and Energetic Modernity
Devin Griffiths