Victorian Writers and the Environment: Ecocritical Perspectives

Description

Applying ecocritical theory to the work of Victorian writers, this collection explores what a diversity of ecocritical approaches can offer students and scholars of Victorian literature, at the same time that it critiques the general effectiveness of ecocritical theory. Interdisciplinary in their approach, the essays take up questions related to the nonhuman, botany, landscape, evolutionary science, and religion. The contributors cast a wide net in terms of genre, analyzing novels, poetry, periodical works, botanical literature, life-writing, and essays. Focusing on a wide range of canonical and noncanonical writers, including Charles Dickens, the Brontes, John Ruskin, Christina Rossetti, Jane Webb Loudon, Anna Sewell, and Richard Jefferies, Victorian Writers and the Environment demonstrates the ways in which nineteenth-century authors engaged not only with humans’ interaction with the environment during the Victorian period, but also how some authors anticipated more recent attitudes toward the environment. Cover Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: Practical ecocriticism and the Victorian text 1 Reading nature: John Ruskin, environment, and the ecological impulse 2 Between “bounded field” and “brooding star”: a study of Tennyson’s topography 3 Celebration and longing: Robert Browning and the nonhuman world 4 “Truth to nature”: the pleasures and dangers of the environment in Christina Rossetti’s poetry 5 The zoocentric ecology of Hardy’s poetic consciousness 6 Early Dickens and ecocriticism: the social novelist and the nonhuman 7 Bleak intra-actions: Dickens, turbulence, material ecology 8 Dark nature: a critical return to Brontë country 9 Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty: reframing the pastoral tradition 10 The environmental politics and aesthetics of Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines: capital, mourning, and desire 11 Jane Loudon’s wildflowers, popular science, and the Victorian culture of knowledge 12 Falling in love with seaweeds: the seaside environments of George Eliot and G. H. Lewes 13 Agriculture and ecology in Richard Jefferies’s Hodge and His Masters 14 Edward Carpenter, Henry Salt, and the animal limits of Victorian environments Sources for further study Editors and Contributors Index