Planets
Document Type
Contribution to Book
Publication Date
2023
Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Source Publication
The Routledge Companion to Politics and Literature in English
Source ISSN
9781003038009
Original Item ID
DOI: 10.4324/9781003038009-44
Abstract
This chapter considers the contested place of “the planet” in literary history, focusing on post-Copernican visions of the planets as spaces of possible human habitation. Fantasies about human colonization of outer space have an important place in the politics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, a time when it becomes simultaneously understood both as a major spending priority of the US military-industrial complex and as the quasi-theological “destiny” of the human race. The conclusion of the chapter takes up a different sort of planetarity: the global cosmopolitan vision of the contemporary ecological movement, which seeks to understand the Earth as a unified totality whose future is threatened by the actions of human beings.
Recommended Citation
Canavan, Gerry, "Planets" (2023). English Faculty Research and Publications. 644.
https://epublications.marquette.edu/english_fac/644
Comments
"Planets," in The Routledge Companion to Politics and Literature in English. Ed. Matthew Stratton. Abingdon: Taylor & Francis (Routledge) 2023: 419-429. DOI.