Probable Exhaustion argues that in this era of fossil capitalism, the concept of progress contains already the threat of exhaustion. This feeling of exhaustion has a long literary representational and figurative prehistory; across the nineteenth century and into the mid-twentieth century, texts across the British Empire grappled with exhaustion across a number of registers and domains. We are accustomed to thinking about anxieties related to resource exhaustion, from parliamentary coal debates in Victorian England to concerns over "peak oil" in the twentieth century. But literary texts from this moment also understand the threat of exhaustion on a physiological level, through depletion of laboring bodies and expulsion of workers from the production process.
Through a lens of Marxian literary ecocriticism, Corbin Hiday examines a series of literary texts that help us think through relations between concretion and abstraction, tracing the lives and afterlives of fossil-fueled modernity within the British Empire. Ultimately, Probable Exhaustion illuminates the unexpected ways that fossil modernity has simultaneously acknowledged and repressed its own inevitable exhaustion.
