This essay is born of the belief that racial justice, social justice, and environmental justice are mutually entangled. Despite their shared commitments to justice, early modern ecocriticism and premodern critical race studies have rarely been in conversation with each other. We address this aporia here and ponder how such intersections can create pathways to more inclusive futures for early modern studies, and for literary studies more broadly. We begin with a brief reflection about how we came to these topics; we then turn to literary and critical works that illustrate the interconnectedness of these issues in premodern literature and explore how those connections persist and haunt our own thinking and writing. This essay is not argumentative in the traditional sense, but rather invites our scholarly communities to unlearn our way to different possibilities.

This essay compares two historical novels, one set in the Victorian period that suggests connections between the Victorian and contemporary eras and the other written in the Victorian period but looking back to a similarly unfinished past. The novels in question, Ian McGuire's The North Water (2016) and Elizabeth Gaskell's Sylvia's Lovers (1863), are both whaling narratives of a kind, but whales feature only infrequently in them: they are largely absent presences—if also important vehicles for memory—in the texts. The essay takes a hauntological approach to explore how the figure of the spectral animal forces readers to reflect on the systematic violence that the human world has historically inflicted on the nonhuman; the texts also open up a colloquy with the dead, both human and nonhuman, that is as much a reckoning with the present as a confrontation with the past.

This essay brings to light J. G. Farrell's novel The Lung (1965), a singularly inventive and politically incisive fiction of epidemic polio. It situates the novel in three key contexts: the neglected history of epidemic poliomyelitis and the state response to it in the postwar United Kingdom; the mid-century polio culture industry; and the English novel itself, which genre The Lung finds incommensurate with the range and extremes of physical pain caused by poliomyelitis. Farrell's novel has been out of print since a paperback edition of 1967 and has never been published outside the United Kingdom. This essay understands the obscurity of The Lung as indicative of a larger and increasingly urgent disconnect between literary studies and the history of public health.

Richard Wright is exemplary of an interwar version of world literature, undergirded by the cultural centers of Moscow and Paris, that valorized progressive antiracist nationalism. Influenced by leftist writers like André Malraux, Wright created the masterpiece of this literary Popular Front, Native Son. During the postwar Red Scare, Wright continued his Popular Front–style cultural politics in Paris, helping France resist the CIA-engineered cultural Cold War. His underappreciated The Outsider resists the construction of a politically quietist canon of high modernist world literature. Although Wright himself later advanced an American exceptionalist perspective in the 1950s, the circulation and translation of his early work inspired a generation of anticolonial writers, such as Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Ousmane Sembène, and Frantz Fanon. Today's globalization-driven world literature models overlook or actively seek to discredit Wright's progressive and antiracist model.

Ecocritical scholars and environmental scientists contend that the earliest detectable signs of anthropogenic global warming manifested as extreme fluctuations in global weather patterns and can be traced back to the 1930s. While modernist scholars have been hard pressed to find evidence of an ecological consciousness among canonical modernists during this decade, this essay demonstrates that Gertrude Stein left a copious and critical archive of climatic change in Everybody's Autobiography, published in 1937. In this lesser known “autobiography,” Stein recounts spectacular and mundane environmental upheavals while criticizing the West's epistemological dissociation of the weather from world events. Moreover, Stein offers an extraordinary reflection on modernity's “eternal” dependence on fossil fuels. By historically situating Stein's numerous weather reports within the political, scientific, environmental, and media discourses of the 1930s, this essay offers a portrait of Stein as an important cultural actor within the broader historiography of modern climate science.