UC Riverside

“Ideologies of Extraction in Premodern Literary Environments” examines how the notion of extractivism iterates itself in depictions of literary environments from the early fourteenth century through the early seventeenth century. Extractivism as I discuss it is an ideology in which people or texts adopt mindsets wherein ecological entities serve a means-end function. By looking at a variety of canonical texts composed through the European medieval and early modern periods, this dissertation examines the breadth and evolution of this culturally contingent and socially hegemonic mindset. Such extractive ideologies manifest in moments that otherwise demonstrate acute ecological awareness or innovative depictions of environmental phenomena, often to uphold the texts’ religious or colonial framework. Though the type of extractivism I discuss is intangible, it remains materially significant. My dissertation resists immediately turning to allegorical interpretations of literary environments, instead approaching them as complex, material entities. Each chapter engages a different set of interdisciplinary theories and frameworks which depend on that chapter’s specific environments of interest.

Beginning with the abyssal depths of medieval waterbodies, my first chapter considers the waterways and swamps of Dante Alighieri’s Inferno in terms of Steve Mentz’s notion of seep ecology. The subsequent chapter examines literary deep seas in Julian of Norwich’s Shewings and the Middle English poem Patience, building off the work of scholars in blue humanities and depth studies, like Melody Jue, Philip Steinberg, and Kimberly Peters. Moving upward, the third chapter discusses the implications of air and atmospheric travel in the sixteenth-century epic poem Orlando Furioso by Ludovico Ariosto, building off Robert A. Heinlein’s definitions of extrapolative and speculative science fiction. The final chapter considers extraction alongside Simon C. Estok’s notion of ecophobia, via the juxtaposition of José de Acosta’s Natural and Moral History of the Indies and William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Collectively, these chapters demonstrate how extractive ideologies become materially significant in the colonial enterprise and academic criticism. This project thus considers the evolution of this rhetoric and extractive mindset to provide a meaningful literary analysis that interweaves conceptions of the environment and its (mis)uses with the political, religious, and colonial motivations of premodern Europe.