On Combustion: Contemporary British Poetry and the Pyrocene (1990-2017)
type: CreativeWork
description: Proposed by the environmental historian Stephen J. Pyne, the term Pyrocene ‘renames and redefines the Anthropocene according to humanity’s primary ecological signature, which is our ability to manipulate fire.’ This thesis draws on Pyne’s ‘Pyrocene’ in order to examine the defining roles of combustion, flame, and fire across a range of contemporary works of experimental British poetry in the period 1990-2017 (particularly those arising from the so-called ‘Cambridge School’). It argues that this body of texts proves exceptionally sensitive to registering and evaluating the cultural traces left by environmental crisis at large, and the Pyrocene in particular, and—also—that this poetry shows itself capable of challenging and developing Pyne’s bio-chemical account of the Pyrocene in new political and ethical directions. A detailed introduction begins by recovering ‘combustion’ from its dispersal across several disciplines and discourses in order to establish, as it were, a contemporary-historical dimension to the process. A case is made for 1990 as a plausible start-date for the current Pyrocene (marked by the predictive modelling of the Kuwaiti oil fires at the 1990 World Climate Conference), while the period surveyed concludes with the Fort McMurray Fire of 2016-17, which consumed a Canadian city dedicated to maximising fossil-fuel extraction from the Albertan tar-sands. This introduction concludes by detailing the specific poetic tradition under scrutiny in the thesis, as well as the forms of reading and criticism which such writing has tended to invite. Having established these contexts, this thesis then undertakes three major case studies across three main chapters, each dedicated primarily to reading a single collection by a single poet: consecutively, Andrea Brady’s Wildfire (2010); Rosa van Hensbergen’s In Accident & Emergence (2015); and Dan Eltringham’s Cairn Almanac (2017). It adopts a methodology of ‘extreme’ close reading throughout; not—as the eco-critic T…
abstract: Proposed by the environmental historian Stephen J. Pyne, the term Pyrocene ‘renames and redefines the Anthropocene according to humanity’s primary ecological signature, which is our ability to manipulate fire.’ This thesis draws on Pyne’s ‘Pyrocene’ in order to examine the defining roles of combustion, flame, and fire across a range of contemporary works of experimental British poetry in the period 1990-2017 (particularly those arising from the so-called ‘Cambridge School’). It argues that this body of texts proves exceptionally sensitive to registering and evaluating the cultural traces left by environmental crisis at large, and the Pyrocene in particular, and—also—that this poetry shows itself capable of challenging and developing Pyne’s bio-chemical account of the Pyrocene in new political and ethical directions. A detailed introduction begins by recovering ‘combustion’ from its dispersal across several disciplines and discourses in order to establish, as it were, a contemporary-historical dimension to the process. A case is made for 1990 as a plausible start-date for the current Pyrocene (marked by the predictive modelling of the Kuwaiti oil fires at the 1990 World Climate Conference), while the period surveyed concludes with the Fort McMurray Fire of 2016-17, which consumed a Canadian city dedicated to maximising fossil-fuel extraction from the Albertan tar-sands. This introduction concludes by detailing the specific poetic tradition under scrutiny in the thesis, as well as the forms of reading and criticism which such writing has tended to invite. Having established these contexts, this thesis then undertakes three major case studies across three main chapters, each dedicated primarily to reading a single collection by a single poet: consecutively, Andrea Brady’s Wildfire (2010); Rosa van Hensbergen’s In Accident & Emergence (2015); and Dan Eltringham’s Cairn Almanac (2017). It adopts a methodology of ‘extreme’ close reading throughout; not—as the eco-critic T…
author: Wynn, Lewis
language: eng
keywords: Contemporary Poetry
license: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/7aa040cc-be2c-48bb-a009-9af1bbec59d8/download
license: http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved
date published: 2025-04-17
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:24:14Z
provider: Cambridge University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Cambridge

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.17863/CAM.121285