Victorian Environmental Nightmares

Description

The twelve essays in Victorian Environmental Nightmares explore various “environmental nightmares” through applied analyses of Victorian texts. Over the course of the nineteenth century, writers of imaginative literature often expressed fears and concerns over environmental degradation (in its wide variety of meanings, including social and moral). In some instances, natural or environmental disasters influenced these responses; in other instances a growing awareness of problems caused by industrial pollution and the growth of cities prompted responses. Seven essays in this volume cover works about Britain and its current and former colonies that examine these nightmare environments at home and abroad. But as the remaining five essays in this collection demonstrate, “environmental nightmares” are not restricted to essays on actual disasters or realistic fiction, since in many cases Victorian writers projected onto imperial landscapes or wholly imagined landscapes in fantastic fiction their anxieties about how humans might change their environments—and how these environments might also change humans. Front Matter ....Pages i-xii Introduction: Representing Victorian Environmental Nightmares (Laurence W. Mazzeno, Ronald D. Morrison)....Pages 1-21 Front Matter ....Pages 23-23 The Assumption of the Dragon: Ruskin’s Mythic Vision (Sara Atwood)....Pages 25-44 Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Failed Pastoral and the Environments of the Poor (Mary Sanders Pollock)....Pages 45-60 Pip’s Nightmare and Orlick’s Dream (Allen MacDuffie)....Pages 61-78 Front Matter ....Pages 79-79 Frances Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans and the EcoGothic (Ronald D. Morrison)....Pages 81-100 James Thomson’s Deserts (John Miller)....Pages 101-119 “Tragic ring-barked forests” and the “Wicked Wood”: Haunting Environmental Anxiety in Late Nineteenth-Century Australian Literature (Susan K. Martin)....Pages 121-143 “Rivers Change Like Nations”: Reading Eco-Apocalypse in The Waters of Edera (Alicia Carroll)....Pages 145-164 Front Matter ....Pages 165-165 Disaster and Deserts: Children’s Natural History as Nightmare and Dream (Naomi Wood)....Pages 167-184 Imperial Ecologies and Extinction in H. G. Wells’s Island Stories (Jade Munslow Ong)....Pages 185-206 Human Intervention and More-Than-Human Humanity in H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau (Shun Yin Kiang)....Pages 207-226 Nowhere to Go: Caught Between Nature and Culture in Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales (Susan M. Bernardo)....Pages 227-242 Ecocrisis and Slow Violence: Anthropocene Readings of Late-Victorian Disaster Narratives (Mark Frost)....Pages 243-262 Back Matter ....Pages 263-273