Environmental Transformations in Victorian, Edwardian and Modernist Essays

Introduction

Dominika Buchowska, Bénédicte Coste and Christine Reynier

Part One: Cole, Ruskin, Nature, and Naturalism

Chapter One

Mark Niemeyer

Thomas Cole’s “Essay on American Scenery” (1836) and the Vanishing Wilderness:

A Tentative Early Expression of the American Ecology Movement

Chapter Two

Stella Granier

Radical Colours: Ruskin’s Chromatic Ethics in the Birth of the Anthropocene

Part Two: Aesthetic Essays and the Transformations of the Natural and the Modern Urban Worlds

Chapter Three

Michele Brugnetti

The Landscape Within: The Aesthetic Renegotiation of a Changing Environment in John Ruskin, Vernon Lee, Frederic George Stephens, and Virginia Woolf

Chapter Four

Bénédicte Coste

“The Ugliness of Modern Life” and the Fin-de-siècle Crisis of Sensibility according to Ouida

Chapter Five

Catherine Delyfer

Dwelling with Birds in Vernon Lee’s Essays

Part Three: Two Ecocritical Re-readings of Virginia Woolf’s “Street Haunting: A London Adventure” (1927)

Chapter Six

Bojana Aćamović

The Wandering Self in the Urban Environment of Virginia Woolf’s “Street Haunting: A London Adventure” (1927)

Chapter Seven

Dominika Buchowska-Greaves

Ecocritical perspectives in Woolf’s “Street Haunting: A London Adventure” and “Kew Gardens”

Part Four: Environmental Essays on the Margins of Modernism

Chapter Eight

Clémence Laburthe-Tolra

From Austerity to Conservation: Sackville-West’s Wartime Essays

Chapter Nine

Christine Reynier

Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Environmental Essays

Biography

Dominika Buchowska-Greaves is the author of “A Sense of Form”: The Art of David Bomberg (2015), and Negotiating Modernism: Art Criticism in The New Age 1907-1922 (2019). She is an Associate Professor at the Department of English and Irish Literature and Literary Linguistics at the Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland, where she teaches English Literature and Culture, and British Art. Her research interests are British modernist and avant-garde art and literature, little magazines, art criticism, as well as connections between poetry and painting. She has written a number of publications on the formation of the London avant-garde at around 1914, the art of David Bomberg, Wyndham Lewis, the “Whitechapel Boys”, Vorticism, Polish Futurism, the art and poetry of the Great War.

Christine Reynier is Professor Emerita of English Literature at Université de Montpellier Paul-Valéry, France. She has published on major modernist writers as well as neglected ones (Woolf, West, Holtby, Sackville-West, S.T. Warner, du Maurier, etc.). She edited books and journals on Woolf and published her first monograph, Virginia Woolf's Ethics of the Short Story (Palgrave Macmillan) in 2009. Her latest publications include Reconnecting Aestheticism and Modernism, co-edited with Bénédicte Coste and Catherine Delyfer (Routledge, 2017), Modernist Non-fictional Narratives of War and Peace (1914-1950), co-edited with Adrian Paterson (Erea 17.2, 2020), Short Fiction as Humble Fiction (Short Fiction in Theory and Practice 10.2, February 2021), and Revisiting the Periodical Essay (1860-1940), with Bénédicte Coste (E-rea, 20.2 (2023). Recently, she has published a second monograph, Virginia Woolf’s Good Housekeeping Essays (Routledge, 2019) and the first critical edition in France of A Room of One’s Own translated by Marie Darieussecq (Un lieu à soi, Gallimard, 2020). Her latest edited volume, with Xavier Le Brun, and with a foreword by Terry Gifford, Modernism and Matter, was published by PULM, the Presses Universitaires de Montpellier, in 2025.