Date of Award
2025
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy in English
Specialization
British Literature and Culture
Department
English
First Advisor
Ryan Trimm
Abstract
This dissertation investigates how twenty-first-century prose fiction navigates the ecological and temporal dimensions of planetary crisis. In response to accelerating pressures - climate change, ecological collapse, and the intensification of capitalist modernity - literary studies has turned increasingly to the planetary as a conceptual frame. Yet this shift has often outpaced the development of adequate critical vocabularies and narrative methodologies. By drawing on ecocriticism, narrative theory, phenomenology, and related fields, Textual Sediments proposes a new framework for reading what it terms the planetary novel: a sedimentary genre characterized by temporal layering, formal hybridity, and a recursive engagement with scale. Through close readings of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being (2013), and Hari Kunzru’s Gods Without Men (2011), the project theorizes the contemporary as a site of epistemic and aesthetic friction, where literature functions not merely as a record of planetary crisis but as a generative medium for its conceptualization.
The study is structured around three interrelated temporal imaginaries - afterwardsness, givenness, and cumulative palimpsest - which offer alternative frameworks for apprehending the disjunctive temporalities of the current geological epoch. Drawing on psychoanalytic theories of belatedness, phenomenological accounts of excess, and critical archaeologies of compression, these concepts support readings attentive to how contemporary fiction reflects ecological trauma, deferred recognition, and planetary precarity. Rather than treating the planetary as a stable horizon of globality or environmental totality, the project emphasizes its contradictory status as both material condition and limit-concept: a figure for disorientation, rupture, and recursive entanglement.
The final chapter turns toward the generic and theoretical stakes of this emergent form, arguing that the planetary novel inherits and transforms the legacy of postmodernism, not by rejecting its metafictional strategies but by repurposing them in response to the demands of deep time and ecological entanglement. In dialogue with theorists such as Wai Chee Dimock, Debjani Ganguly, Caroline Edwards, and Jeremy Green, the project reframes the planetary novel as a genre defined not by thematic unity but by a palimpsestic ecology of forms. Ultimately, Textual Sediments contends that fiction offers a privileged site for engaging the ethical and aesthetic challenges of the contemporary planetary condition - challenges that demand new modes of reading, writing, and imagining beyond the Anthropocentric frame.
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Recommended Citation
Bowden, William, "TEXTUAL SEDIMENTS: GENRE AND THE PLANETARY NOVEL" (2025). Open Access Dissertations. Paper 4496.
https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/oa_diss/4496