Victorian Ecocriticism

The Politics of Place and Early Environmental Justice

Buch | Softcover

210 Seiten

2019
Lexington Books (Verlag)
978-1-4985-5108-3 (ISBN)

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This interdisciplinary collection explores Victorian literature and its connection to various fields such as environmental history, ecology, and evolutionary biology. Further, the edition features seminal nineteenth-century figures advancing the cause of early environmental justice linked to place.

Victorian Ecocriticism: The Politics of Place and Early Environmental Justice aims to take up the challenge that Lawrence Buell lays out in The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (2005). Buell decries: “For in order to bring ‘environmental justice into ecocriticism,’ a few more articles or conference sessions won’t suffice. There must be ‘a fundamental rethinking and reworking of the field as a whole’” (Buell 113). While discussions about nature conservation and preservation have been important within the context of ecocriticism, Buell asserts that the holy grail for the field is actually how literary critics engage in discourse about questions of place as space humanized for the purpose of tracing, disclosing, and advancing the important issue of environmental justice—as it applies to human beings, animals, and plants. The “fundamental reworking” or shift in the field of Victorian Studies really has to do with the dearth of ecocritical publishing about seminal authors and literary texts. Victorian Ecocriticism aims to participate in filling that vacuum, lack, or lacuna by featuring current research about the Victorian era from an ecocritical perspective.

Victorian Ecocriticism hopes to identify, establish, and organize its content based on six themes: Ecocrisis, Ecofeminism, Ecogothicism, Ecohistoricism, Ecotheology, and Ecological Interdependence. The edited collection, thus, has two aims. First, selected places among others featured in the edition will provide environmental contexts, often with political implications: American rural landscape (e.g., Walden Pond), Australian mines, British hill-country, metropolis, mill towns, the sea, and the woods. Second, the edition includes discussions about various instances of early environmental justice evident during the mid-nineteenth century such as, but not limited to: anti-railway campaigns, biological egalitarianism, labor disputes due to adverse working conditions, patterns of displacement, reactions to Victorian scientism, resistance to enclosure, and working class education.

Victorian Ecocriticism is an interdisciplinary edition. It focuses on Victorian literature as the foundational discipline linked to various disciplines such as ecology, evolutionary biology, natural history, and soil science. The topics are wide-ranging, significant, and contemporary discussing the politics of place as well as early environmental justice.

Dewey W. Hall is professor of English and director of English education at California State Polytechnic University Pomona.

Foreword by Laura Dassow Walls

Part One: Place in the British Isles

Chapter 1
Introduction: The Matter of Place-Consciousness
Dewey W. Hall
Chapter 2
Railways, Tourism, and Preservation in the Victorian Lake District: from Wordsworth to Rawnsley
Saeko Yoshikawa
Chapter 3
Wending Homeward: The Material Turn in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre
Adrian Tait
Chapter 4
Hard Times: Factory Education, Factory System, and the Preston Strike
Dewey W. Hall

Chapter 5
The Politics of Place Attachment and the Laboring Body in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles
Jillmarie Murphy

Part Two: Place in Australia, Newfoundland, and America

Chapter 6
Antipodal Ecology: Colonial Landscaping in Victorian Fiction
Julie M. Barst
Chapter 7
Ecotheological Morality in Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies
Akemi Yoshida
Chapter 8
Philip Henry Gosse, Newfoundland, and the Unveiling of Wonders
Sue Edney
Chapter 9
Seeing Soils
Marlee Fuhrmann
Chapter 10
“Different shades of green”: Elizabeth Gaskell’s EcoGothic Short Fictions
Michelle Deininger and Natalie Rose Cox

Erscheinungsdatum	05.06.2019
Reihe/Serie	Ecocritical Theory and Practice
Co-Autor	Julie M. Barst, Natalie Rose Cox, Michelle J. Deininger, Sue Edney
Verlagsort	Lanham, MD
Sprache	englisch
Maße	151 x 226 mm
Gewicht	340 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Allgemeines / Lexika
Themenwelt	Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Neuzeit (bis 1918)
ISBN-10	1-4985-5108-4 / 1498551084
ISBN-13	978-1-4985-5108-3 / 9781498551083
Zustand	Neuware