Energy, Technology, Ecology: British Steamships in Romantic Literature and Culture

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Ute Berns
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 569284922

This study on the literary advent of the steamship investigates how Boulton and Watt’s refined steam engine, and the transformations it brought about, were imagined and represented in the literature of the British romantic period, a period understood as a significant phase in the Anthropocene/Capitalocene. The steam engine, alternatively labelled as ‘fire engine’ or ‘atmospheric engine’, will be conceived as the interface of material transformations of chemical and mechanical forces or energies. These, in their turn, drove massive ecological, economic and social transformations. Addressing the world’s entry into a fossil economy, the projected monograph will explore the historical moment when the steam engine first left the industrial sites of mining and manufacture and, by reshaping the field of transport, fully entered public life and a wider public consciousness. The emergence of the steam engine in everyday infrastructure originally took the shape of the steamship, conquering the waterways long before the advent of the regular public railway in Britain some 20 years later. The research project will investigate how the fossil-powered ship and the transformations it engendered were registered both in canonical and lesser-known instances of the period’s literature (by S.T. Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Joanna Baillie a.o.). More specifically, I will study how the steamship and the energy that powered it were modelled both aesthetically and critically, as that vessel became entangled, imaginatively, with proto-ecological and socio-political discourses and practices. The study will showcase how romantic poetics across different genres participated in revising contemporary conceptions of energy and also in shaping attitudes to steam technology in everyday life. Taking the emergence of the steamship in British literature as an iconic instance of fossil modernity, the monograph investigates the interrelations of the history of technology and the history of nature as they were negotiated in the period’s literature. By closing a crucial research gap in a period extolled for its ‘turn to Nature’, my interdisciplinary study of the literary rise of the steamship promotes further ties between Romantic Studies, Science and Technology Studies as well as the Energy and Environmental Humanities.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants