MLA Annual Conference, Toronto, Canada, January 7-10, 2021

This panel consolidates the recent turn in early modern literary criticism toward catastrophe, crisis, and vulnerability. These presentations foreground the way early modern writers produced a deep repertoire about sudden, transformative changes in environment. By doing so, we call for a theoretical reassessment of how the representation of eco-catastrophe intersected with discourses of identity and embodiment. Eco-catastrophe, as this panel argues, was central to the formation of race, sexuality, and nation in the period.

The scholarship presented in this panel is especially indebted to recent studies like Lydia Barnett’s After the Flood: Imagining the Global Environment in Early Modern Europe (2019), Geoffrey Parker’s Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (2013), Kathleen Donegan’s Seasons of Misery: Catastrophe and Colonial Settlement in Early America (2013), and Vin Nardizzi’s Wooden Os: Shakespeare's Theatres and England's Trees (2013). These important studies have combined environmental history with fresh readings of archival material to contribute to our understanding of the major events of the period: the emergence of capitalism, early colonialism, the Little Ice Age, and the “General Crisis” of the 17th century.

 This panel, however, invites us to recalibrate the focus of scholarship on ecological catastrophes from the geopolitical scale to the scale of the body. These papers track the complex ramifications that floods, droughts, and storms had on individual subjects, to take the measure of the literary significance of early modern disaster. Anxieties about the destruction of environment were inextricably linked to ideas of embodied vulnerability and embodied resilience. Through close readings of texts by the early modern writers like Ben Jonson (1572-1637), Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616), and William Shakespeare (1564-1616), this panel demonstrates that identity, the body, and destroyed environments as dialectically bound up together.

Respondent: Laurie Shannon, Northwestern University

• The Erotics of Salvage

John Yargo, University of Massachusetts Amherst

• Ophelia’s “Good End”: Water and Ecosexual Desire

Lisa Robinson, St John's University

• Ben Jonson's New World Humors

  Caro Pirri, Rutgers University

• Playhouse Climates and Plural Existence

  Ellen MacKay, University of Chicago