| Popis: |
This chapter demonstrates how the provincial realist novel incorporated exhaustion as a temporal structure to depict the new horizons of human life under extractivism. Provincial realism's longstanding reliance on the marriage plot and the inheritance plot, on providing closure via social reproduction, transforms against the backdrop of extractivism to withhold the promise of reproductive futurity. As the steam engine and other industrial technologies were transforming the scale and impacts of mining in the backwaters of global empire, discourse around exhaustion, futurity, and decline reached a new stage as well, transforming the endings, trajectories, and temporalities of the provincial realist novel. Thus, all the novels discussed in the chapter take place in settings of extraction or exhausted extraction — sacrifice zones. And all explore the temporal structure of an extraction-based present claimed at the expense of future generations. |
