In The British Industrial Canal: Reading the Waterways from the Eighteenth Century to the Anthropocene, Jodie Matthews capably and elegantly succeeds on two very different levels of argumentation. She constructs both a persuasive, finely detailed demonstration of the unacknowledged centrality of the monograph's eponymous waterways in literature and, at a higher level of abstraction, a provocation to read differently in the Anthropocene. If recent theorizations of the end of the Holocene have made it possible to “understand the Earth as a text,” then, Matthews concludes, literary scholars must consider “how this might affect our reading of other texts and our relationship to history” (13). “In a time in which water and fossil-fueled industry take on new meaning,” Matthews argues, so does reading: the Anthropocene is “a particular scene of reading … that alters what and how we read” (3). Wisely, she constructs arguments in advance against any protestations that bringing a contemporary concept to bear on past literatures would commit the scholarly sin of presentism—that is, would be anachronistic to the point of misinterpreting and appropriating texts for the exclusive use of contemporary readers. Using literary texts invalidates such allegations because “affective encounters with canal spaces today are always in relation to the uses of those spaces in the past, experiences which pour into the present via shared cultural memory accessible via texts,” such that “encounters from different periods open out into each other” (8). Reading literature, Matthews insists, is therefore crucial for connecting past with present, human networks with inhuman networks, and all of the foregoing with the precarious condition of the physical world today.

Appropriately in terms of the monograph’s placement in the University of Wales Press’s Intersections of Literature and Science series, Matthews confidently traverses a variety of scholarly and aesthetic intersections, collecting an interdisciplinary coterie of concepts drawn from ecology, affect theory, network theory, postcolonial theory, literary formalism, new materialism, the Anthropocene, historiography, and more. She brings these to bear upon an equally eclectic set of canal-related literary and scientific texts from the eighteenth century to the present. To manage what might be an unruly archive, Matthews supplies an unusually extensive index and promises to present “a cultural web of texts rather than a linear survey” (8). This strategy is as much motivated by her responsibility to integrate all these conceptual threads in the literary figure of the canal as it is by the waterway's physical structure. The canal network is “a system of waterways initially linking materials, industries and markets” that became “part of a network of lives, histories, cultures, animals, natural resources, climate … the list could go on and on” (8). To provide more shape to this baggy infinity, Matthews delivers a perfect specimen of the introductory chapter genre. Chapter 1 patiently defines relevant historical and theoretical concepts in a logical order and establishes the privileged position that canals occupy by virtue of being “histories we can touch,” an embodiment of dense networks that connect historical forces (such as ecological change, war, class, genre, and empire), affectively laden human experiences, and literary productions (7).

Matthews begins each chapter—and every subsection within each chapter—with an evocative passage in the tale of Industrious, a fictional boat designed to banish the anthropomorphism pervasive in literary criticism by replacing it with what she terms “anthropo-eccentrism” (5). A charming literary device of Matthews’s own creation, the fictive vessel is reinvented for different time periods. The scattered, cumulative narrative of time-traveling Industrious blends historical conditions, human affects, and literary texts, lending a rare immediacy and intuitiveness to Matthews’s sophisticated understanding of the canal’s networked condition. It also cognitively prepares the reader to engage deeply with a series of texts that might remain obscure otherwise. Ultimately, Industrious’s evocative intensity suggests that Matthews’s “anthropo-eccentrism” will find traction faster than her coining of the “Anthroposcene” (3), meant to frame the Anthropocene as a particular real-world scene that enables a new kind of reading. In addition to suffering from the confusion generated by the letter s, purposefully formatted differently than the word’s other letters, it is unlikely to make an impression in the painfully overcrowded (and sometimes exasperating) academic marketplace of Anthropocene variants.

In chapter 2, Industrious narrates a day in the life of an Industrial Revolution-era coal carrier to contextualize canal imagery in the works of Anna Letitia Barbauld, Anna Seward, and Erasmus Darwin. Matthews focuses on the writers’ ambivalence toward the ecologically destabilizing forces of capitalism that set canals flowing in the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. The chapter’s secondary theme of colonialism attempts to come to the fore in chapter 3, although its restriction to internal (intra-England) forms of power asymmetries—classism against laborers and anti-Romani prejudice—will disappoint readers who would prefer a sustained consideration of the global British empire, its subjugated African victims, or both. Chapter 4 investigates a fascinating clutch of memoirs by women recruited as boatmen (as they were then called) during World War II. Published intermittently between 1947 and 2014, these texts perfectly demonstrate Matthews’s claim about the uninterrupted inheritance of cultural memories through reading experiences. Set firmly in the twenty-first century, Matthews’s fifth chapter identifies two new subgenres of canal literature—the New Nature Writing of the canals and canal noir—that wrest humans’ repressed guilt over ecological destruction into painful consciousness. In the conclusion, Matthews adds considerable value to her chapter summaries by reframing them as invitations pointing to future scholarship on energy cultures and ecological imperialism. Though she ends with a centripetally forceful return to the favored object at hand, the canals, her final definition—“the waterway network is a tool to help describe something, not simply what is being described”—can be read as a provocation for others to identify their own such tool, an objective correlative for what their own fields and preoccupations can offer to denizens of the Anthropocene (174).