Vital Moments: Life, Matter, and Time in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

The environmental and political crises humanity faces today have given rise to influential new theories of life, matter, and time. Vitalism, a controversial term describing the ideas of philosophers from Lucretius to Bergson, provides a common intellectual foundation linking many of the contemporary efforts to reconstruct our understanding of nonhuman agency and the place of humanity in the world.

Vital Moments argues that it is time to critically assess neovitalism's potential as a discour...