Vital Moments: Life, Matter, and Time in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Oxford Studies in American Literary History)

The environmental and political crises humanity faces today have given rise to influential new theories of life, matter, and time.Vitalism, a controversial term describing the ideas of philosophers from Lucretius to Bergson, provides a common intellectual foundation linking many of the contemporary efforts to reconstruct our understanding of nonhuman agency and the place of humanity in the world.Vital Moments argues that it is time to critically assess neovitalism's potential as a discourse of hope in light of the specific ways in which this potential has been shaped by the genealogy of vitalist perspectives.The emergence of modern vitalist representational forms in the nineteenth century was closely tied to colonialist projects of resource extraction and bioprospecting.Literary narratives linked political liberalism to a temporal structure in which life could be defined and controlled for the benefit of a privileged class.Romances of nonhuman agency idealized the democratic promise of