Victorian Writers and the Environment: Ecocritical Perspectives(Among the Victorians and Modernists)

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.

Table of Contents:
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

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