“Chapter one attributes Poe's apocalyptic collapses of panpsychic matter (from the early tales to the late Eureka) to a cosmology that borrowed from euphoric contemporary theories of the universe while defying their idealism. Chapter two argues for a similarly fraught dynamic between an author and the cosmological norms of his age: in key ways, all of Adams's texts revoke the optimism of teleological historiography by submitting humanity to the degrading laws of physics rather than the promised perfectibility of popular Darwinism; Adams's record of his own entropic degradation in The Education is thus best understood through reference to what he termed his ‘scientific histories’.”

“Where do you draw the line between one creature and another? Where does one organism stop and another begin? Is there even a boundary between you and the non-living world, or will the atoms of this page be a part of your body tomorrow? How, in short, can you make any sense out of the conception of a man as a discrete entity? How can the proper study form man be man if it is impossible for man to exist out of context. For the ecologist, then, the desire of some in the humanities to deal only with the fragment of reality they term ‘human’ is nonsense.”