ABSTRACT
This chapter surveys and analyzes how literary critics have adapted their methods to account for the concept and conditions of the Anthropocene. It considers how critics have redefined their sense of the relation between the humanities and the natural sciences, how they have integrated a recognition of the influence of human activity on planetary systems into the practice of critique, and how they have redefined the fundamental concepts to fit an ecological understanding of the world. As a crisis of both planetary ecology and human thought and feeling, the Anthropocene potentially exposes the literature’s vital role in sustaining human life.
