Introduction

Abstract

The introduction positions the book in relation to extant scholarship, particularly on the Tambora eruption, material ecocriticism, and the Anthropocene. Writing Tambora innovatively addresses the question of how global catastrophe is rhetorically produced. The subsequent discussion details three areas of research which the book draws on and to which it also contributes: disaster studies; new materialism and speculative realism; and the cultural history of climate change. Challenging the idea of the Anthropocene as an epistemological breach between past and present, Writing Tambora instead articulates a more historicist methodology which finds important resonances between Romantic and present-day imaginings of climate change—especially around questions of agency—and therefore brings Romantic studies and the environmental humanities into productive dialogue.