Modernism and the Anthropocene: Material Ecologies of Twentieth-Century Literature edited by Jon Hegglund and John McIntyre, London, Lexington Books, 2021, vii + 246 pp., US$100, £80 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-4985-5538-8

In Modernism and the Anthropocene: Material Ecologies of Twentieth-Century Literature, editors Jon Hegglund and John McIntyre assemble 12 essays which place modernism and the Anthropocene in direct conversation as concepts of acceleration and crisis. Aware of the challenges in defining these terms, the collection explores how each ‘interrupts and contradicts the other’ (×ii) through readings of early twentieth-century literature – from Vorticism and Samuel Beckett to the worldmaking capacities of comic books. With close readings, theoretical interventions and comparative analysis, the authors offer a wide-ranging and emergent contribution to recent debates around the Anthropocene as both proposed geological epoch and cultural heuristic for understanding environmental crisis. Addressing the relatively slow uptake of ecocritical thinking within modernist studies, the book’s central aim is to show how contemporary Anthropocenic literary production is contiguous with modernist experimentation and its ‘early echo[es]’ (116) of ecological thought.