Victorian Writers and the Environment Ecocritical Perspectives

About this book

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 Brontës, 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.

Contents

List of Figures
Acknowledgements

Introduction Practical Ecocriticism and the Victorian Text
      Laurence W. Mazzeno, Alvernia University and Ronald D. Morrison, Morehead State University

Chapter 1: Reading Nature: John Ruskin, Environment, and the Ecological Impulse
      Mark Frost, University of Portsmouth
Chapter 2: Between "bounded field" and "brooding star": A Study of Tennyson’s Topography
      Valerie Purton, Anglia Ruskin University
Chapter 3: Celebration and Longing: Robert Browning and the Nonhuman World
      Ashton Nichols, Dickinson College
Chapter 4: "Truth to Nature": The Pleasures and Dangers of the Environment in Christina Rossetti’s Poetry
      Serena Trowbridge, Birmingham City University
Chapter 5: The Zoocentric Ecology of Hardy’s Poetic Consciousness
      Christine Roth, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh
Chapter 6: Early Dickens and Ecocriticism: The Social Novelist and the Nonhuman
      Troy Boone, University of Pittsburgh
Chapter 7: Bleak Intra-Actions: Dickens, Turbulence, Material Ecology
      John Parham, University of Worcester
Chapter 8: Dark Nature: A Critical Return to Brontë Country
      Deirdre d’Albertis, Bard College
Chapter 9: Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty: Reframing the Pastoral Tradition
      Erin Bistline, Texas Tech University
Chapter 10: The Environmental Politics and Aesthetics of Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines: Capital, Mourning and Desire
      John Miller, University of Sheffield
Chapter 11: Jane Loudon’s Wildflowers, Popular Science, and the Victorian Culture of Knowledge
      Mary Ellen Bellanca, University of South Carolina Sumter
Chapter 12: Falling in Love with Seaweeds: The Seaside Environments of George Eliot and G.H. Lewes
      Anna Feuerstein, University of Hawai’i at Manoa
Chapter 13: Agriculture and Ecology in Richard Jefferies’s Hodge and His Masters
      Ronald D. Morrison, Morehead State University
Chapter 14: Edward Carpenter, Henry Salt, and the Animal Limits of Victorian Environments
      Jed Mayer, SUNY at New Paltz

Sources for Further Study
Editors and Contributors
Index

Customer Reviews

Biography

Laurence W. Mazzeno is President Emeritus at Alvernia University, USA. Ronald D. Morrison is Professor of English at Morehead State University, USA.