“Menely’s book addresses an extraordinarily taxing interpretive problem. How has the turbulence of the Earth itself intervened in the history of poetic form? His answer is revelatory. With erudition, subtlety, and literary éclat, Menely sets out a geohistorical criticism whereby poetry from Milton to the Romantics is rendered new. Climate and the Making of Worlds will have a profound and immediate influence on environmental criticism of the long eighteenth century. All subsequent scholarship in the field will have to reckon with its radiant insights.”

Jeremy Davies, University of Leeds

“Climate and the Making of Worlds is a bracing, fully-realized example of what it means to reconceptualize literary history—and indeed, critical theory—in terms that finally avow the Earth as the active condition of every form of cultural production. Menely illuminates the power of verse to disclose its dependency upon the energetic vicissitudes of a planet that both enables and exceeds human economic and imaginative ends. As careful as it is courageous, Climate and the Making of Worlds will constitute an indispensable treatise on method for materialist ecocriticism and the energy humanities for years to come.”

Amanda Jo Goldstein, University of California, Berkeley

“Climate and the Making of Worlds is a well-researched, cogently argued, and unusually perceptive analysis of the poetic transformations that registered an epochal rift: the shift in the eighteenth-century from an advanced organic economy based on solar energy to an energy economy dependent on fossil fuels. Drawing on a wide range of scholarship in economics, ecological thought, the history of science, and ecocriticism, Menely brilliantly explores how the transformation of Britain’s energy economy shaped georgic and locodescriptive verse from John Milton to Charlotte Smith.”

Robert Markley, University of Illinois

"Climate and the Making of Worlds is a stunning book. . . . an ambitious and important intervention into literary studies [which] decisively shows that the sociopolitical analysis of texts is more powerful and more comprehensive when critics acknowledge the Earth system that underlies all human activity."

Modern Philology