Congratulations to Sebastian Egholm Lund who has been awarded the Richard Stein Essay Prize for his article “The Climate of Utopia: Victorian Hothouses and H.G. Wells”.
The Richard Stein Essay Prize is awarded by INCS (Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies) and recognizes excellence in interdisciplinary scholarship on any nineteenth-century topic.
The judges commented:
Sebastian Egholm Lund’s article, “The Climate of Utopia: Victorian Hothouses and H.G. Wells,” is a superb work of ecocritical literary scholarship. Lund’s persuasive argument unfolds in compelling prose, elucidating the Victorian techno-utopian hubris of envisioning an Edenic planetary hothouse, while forging connections with the unsettling prospect of solar geoengineering as a response to climate change today. Grounded in expert historical research and perceptive textual analysis, Lund focuses on the writings of Wells, particularly The Time Machine (1895), as well as the more obscure short story “The Flowering of the Strange Orchid” (1894). From the Wardian case to the Crystal Palace, Lund contextualizes Wells’s visions of climate engineering within “the metaphoric paradox of the hothouse,” in which the Victorian era both instigated catastrophic climate change through exponential increases in atmospheric carbon emissions, and simultaneously envisioned an ideal future of anthropogenic technological environmental manipulation. Timely and thought-provoking, Lund suggests the limitations of planetary climate engineering, as foreshadowed by Wells and as manifested in the current climate crisis.
Find out more about the prize on the INCS website.
