Foreword: The City and the Anthropocene

Regularly depicted in opposition to more bucolic images, the city has frequently represented the worst excesses of human inhabitation of the natural environment. Often a topos presaging apocalyptic visions in the literature of modernism and post-modernism, the city has a long history as an object of representation. Historically, literature has framed cities in very specific ways. A special issue of PMLA, Cities (Yaeger), offers a broad set of discussions of some of these representational strategies, yet it does so largely outside the context of ecocritical inquiry. While there are hundreds of books about urban ecologies, there are relatively few on the topic from literary perspectives, and fewer still from ecocritical approaches. Meanwhile, literature has, from the early modern period to the twenty-first century, addressed the city/country binary from positions that are often deeply critical of environmental derogation and of the complicity of cities in the continued ruining of nature. Raymond Williams famously addressed the theoretical matter of the city/country binary from the perspective of class and environment, yet the theoretical trajectory within the environmental humanities since then has been to look at the ecologies of cities (Bennett and Teague; Schliephake). Literature, too, has been deeply concerned with the ecology of cities, and literary cities since the late nineteenth century are regularly the epitome of waste and spoilage. Well-known examples—such as Eliot's London in “The Wasteland” or Joyce's Dublin in Ulysses—are well within a tradition that envisions cities as filthy. By the end of the twentieth century, with a larger global consciousness about serious environmental issues, these representations take on different and more urgent meanings. While world populations increasingly flow into urban areas and environmental problems continue to become markedly worse, new areas of literary inquiry are rapidly opening up. One of the purposes of this special issue is to look at the myriad ways that contemporary authors write about urban matters and about how they represent the Anthropocene city.