Jesse Oak Taylor, "While the World Burns: Joseph Conrad and the Delayed Decoding of Catastrophe.”19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century. 25 (2017): DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/ntn.798
This article offers a reading of Joseph Conrad’s ‘Youth’ as an exercise in Earth system poetics, situating the story within both the energy transition from sail to steam and the emergence of the Anthropocene. In the process, it examines the ways in which Conrad’s inside-out account of an exploding coal ship offers a study in climate change denial, dramatizing the cognitive and affective limits to apprehending planetary change.