"No One Lives in the Future" by Morgan Vanek
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Author Biography

Morgan Vanek is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Calgary. Her areas of research and teaching specialization include the politics of writing about weather and climate in eighteenth-century transatlantic literature, travel writing, and early Canadian literature. Her work has appeared in Eighteenth-Century Studies, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Studies in Canadian Literature, and Pedagogy.

Abstract

In the context of catastrophic climate change, the optimism that underpins our economic models for calculating the future cost of present risks has become both untenable and dangerous. Nonetheless, even writing urgently concerned with these risks continues to invoke a version of the Child as a figure of futurity that appears to naturalize both this optimism and our present inaction. In this essay, I argue that we might find another path forward by looking back to the eighteenth-century stories that seem to demonstrate a similar preoccupation with children in danger. Taking Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress as a representative example, I highlight the hinged structure of these narratives as a useful new approach to imagining intergenerational risks and responsibilities in our shared present.

Keywords

Hogarth, A Harlot’s Progress, reproductive futurism, climate change, child, children, social cost of carbon

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