First issued in paperback in 2019. Includes bibliographical references and index.
Contents:
14. Edward Carpenter, Henry Salt, and the animal limits of Victorian environments / Jed Mayer. 1. Reading nature : John Ruskin, environment, and the ecological impulse / Mark Frost -- 2. Between "bounded field" and "brooding star" : a study of Tennyson's topography / Valerie Purton -- 3. Celebration and longing : Robert Browning and the nonhuman world / Ashton Nichols -- 4. "Truth to nature" : the pleasures and dangers of the environment in Christina Rossetti's poetry / Serena Trowbridge -- 5. The zoocentric ecology of Hardy's poetic consciousness / Christine Roth -- 6. Early Dickens and ecocriticism : the social novelist and the nonhuman / Troy Boone -- 7. Bleak intra-actions : Dickens, turbulence, material ecology / John Parham -- 8. Dark nature : a critical return to Brontèˆ country / Deirdre d'Albertis -- 9. Anna Sewell's "Black Beauty" : reframing the pastoral tradition / Erin Bistline -- 10. The environmental politics and aesthetics of Rider Haggard's "King Solomon's Mines" : capital, mourning, and desire / John Miller -- 11. Jane Loudon's wildflowers, popular science, and the Victorian culture of knowledge / Mary Ellen Bellanca -- 12. Falling in love with seaweeds : the seaside environments of George Eliot and G.H. Lewes / Anna Feuerstein -- 13. Agriculture and ecology in Richard Jefferies's "Hodge and His Masters" / Ronald D. Morrison -- 14. Edward Carpenter, Henry Salt, and the animal limits of Victorian environments / Jed Mayer.
Summary:
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. -- From the rear cover.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.