In Human Scale
Victorian Literature and the Planetary Imagination
Benjamin Morgan(Author)
University of Chicago Press
Will be published approx. on 7. December 2026
Book
Paperback/Softback
272 pages
978-0-226-85400-7 (ISBN)
Description
An innovative account of how literature has helped bridge the gap between ordinary human experience and the vast scale of the natural world.
Is it possible to connect our lived experience of time to the vast eons of the planet's history? This question has perplexed writers and scientists for more than two hundred years, from Darwin's account of natural selection through contemporary writing about climate change. Benjamin Morgan's insightful study shows how literature of the nineteenth century helped readers leap from their everyday sense of time and space to the vast, inhuman scales of the natural world.
Through writings that range from Arctic voyage narratives to Thomas Hardy's novels, utopian fiction of the 1880s, H. G. Wells's The Time Machine, and beyond, Morgan helps us understand scalar incommensurability in its deeper intellectual and cultural contexts. Victorians struggled to grasp senses of proportion not only through time scales but also through scales of aesthetic magnitude, of relative value, of social totality, and of the planet's future. Morgan argues that a scale is not just a timeline; it is a way of finding order and proportion through many kinds of comparative measurement. His literary history of scale illuminates both the challenge of imagining the vastness of planetary time and the history of creating a human sense of proportion.
Is it possible to connect our lived experience of time to the vast eons of the planet's history? This question has perplexed writers and scientists for more than two hundred years, from Darwin's account of natural selection through contemporary writing about climate change. Benjamin Morgan's insightful study shows how literature of the nineteenth century helped readers leap from their everyday sense of time and space to the vast, inhuman scales of the natural world.
Through writings that range from Arctic voyage narratives to Thomas Hardy's novels, utopian fiction of the 1880s, H. G. Wells's The Time Machine, and beyond, Morgan helps us understand scalar incommensurability in its deeper intellectual and cultural contexts. Victorians struggled to grasp senses of proportion not only through time scales but also through scales of aesthetic magnitude, of relative value, of social totality, and of the planet's future. Morgan argues that a scale is not just a timeline; it is a way of finding order and proportion through many kinds of comparative measurement. His literary history of scale illuminates both the challenge of imagining the vastness of planetary time and the history of creating a human sense of proportion.
Reviews / Votes
"In Human Scale is a timely, original, and important work. It tackles head-on today's often recognized problem of incommensurability: how do we relate human experience, understanding, and individual consciousness of vulnerability to the terrifying vastness of climate change? Running through the book is the question of how, and why, scale has become such a crucial issue for the environmental humanities. This is no celebration of the human, however, but rather an interrogation of the place of human bodies and minds when it comes to establishing scalar relativity and dissonance."* Kate Flint, University of Southern California *
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Chicago
United States
Publishing group
The University of Chicago Press
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Illustrations
17 halftones
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 140 mm
Weight
454 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-226-85400-7 (9780226854007)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Benjamin Morgan is associate professor and chair of English language and literature at the University of Chicago, where he is also a member of the Committee on Environment, Geography, and Urbanization. He is the author of The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature.