Dr. Bethany Williamson recently published a scholarly article in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, entitled "Inexhaustible Mines and Post-lapsarian Decay: The End of Improvement in Defoe's Tour." Part of a special issue on natural history in the age of Daniel Defoe, her article considers how Defoe's fictional travel narrative about the British isles highlights a tension between human efforts to "improve" the natural world (especially through the profitable activity of mining) and recognition that this work accelerates natural processes of depletion and decay. In the process, she argues, Defoe raises important questions about how we ought to think about and care for the environment.
Read the full abstract and download Williamson's article through Project Muse (free, with a Biola library log-in): https://muse.jhu.edu/article/734777.
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