Background
The word “atmosphere” first started to be used about culture around 1800. It named an environing mood or affective dimension, referring to the tone of an occasion or setting, for instance, or the ambience or aura that surrounded an object. Before that date, the word’s field of reference had been largely restricted to the physical and mechanical meanings of eighteenth-century natural philosophy.
Poetic shifts
Quite strikingly, this shift originated in specifically poetic contexts. The distinguishing genius of Wordsworth’s poetry, Coleridge would write in 1817, is that it communicates the atmosphere of an object or action. Fifteen years earlier, Wordsworth himself had defined the domain of poetry as the “atmosphere of sensation.” Through uses such as these, the literary culture of Romanticism established a new atmospheric vocabulary for discussing and understanding culture itself. And in this way, it intertwined the languages of culture and climate.
Rise of meteorology
Historians of science tend to identify precisely this period—the early years of the nineteenth century—as the moment when meteorology took on a recognisably modern disciplinary form. It was also the moment when pneumatic chemistry (the eighteenth-century study of gases) was transformed into modern chemistry, on the one hand, and thermodynamics, on the other. Around 1800, air was becoming the field of an increasingly independent and formalised set of scientific practices, as knowledge became increasingly differentiated and specialised.
Aerial transformations
Nineteenth-Century Climate Change investigates what these two aerial transformations have to do with each other. It studies a paradox: the fact that, in the decades on either side of the turn of the nineteenth century, the vocabulary of atmosphere was pulled in two contrary directions. On the one hand, atmospheric thinking was critical for articulating theories of poetic autonomy and for the emergence of the modern atmospheric sciences. On the other hand, atmosphere was also a central means for conceiving what it was that literature, science and art shared.
As a site of convergent interests, atmosphere linked increasingly disparate communicative practices and forms of social life. So atmosphere allowed the drawing of disciplinary divisions, fixing specialised discourses in their newly differentiated social locations. But it was also understood to be the underlying cultural substrate that allowed concepts, practices and ideas to move between them.
Unwritten chapter
This research project tells an as yet unwritten chapter in the cultural history of climate change. It investigates the prehistory of our everyday use of climatic vocabulary: what we mean we talk, for instance, of the “political climate,” or of a city’s “menacing atmosphere.” It establishes a new atmospheric frame for the historical interpretation of canonical Romantic poetry (looking in particular detail at Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley). And it examines a critical point in the divergence of the “two cultures” of the sciences and the humanities—a chasm or impasse in the organisation of knowledge that has taken on a new urgency and significance in our own era, that of twenty-first century climate change.
Research outputs
The primary research outputs of this project include:
- a scholarly monograph on Romantic Atmospheres: The Poetics of Aerial Culture, 1774-1848;
- a conference on The Cultural History of Climate Change, held at the Humanities Research Centre in late August, 2012;
- a collection of essays on The Cultural History of Climate Change, edited by Tom Bristow and Tom Ford; and
- a short film, Weathsounds, directed by Tom Ford and Alexander James, on the contemporary resonance of the nineteenth-century histories of weather art and science, which will premiere in December 2012.
Chief Investigator
Dr Tom Ford, Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University.
Funding
Nineteenth-Century Climate Change is a Discovery Project funded by an Australian Research Council grant.