1st Edition
Victorian Writers and the Environment Ecocritical Perspectives
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.
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
Biography
Laurence W. Mazzeno is President Emeritus at Alvernia University, USA. Ronald D. Morrison is Professor of English at Morehead State University, USA
