Haunting Ecologies
Victorian Conceptions of Water
Seiten
2024
University of Virginia Press (Verlag)
978-0-8139-5097-6 (ISBN)
University of Virginia Press (Verlag)
978-0-8139-5097-6 (ISBN)
Drawing on material ecocriticism, this book argues that Victorian Britons were keenly aware of aquatic agency, recognizing water as an active force with the ability to infiltrate bodies and spaces. Sheds new light on Victorian-era anxieties about water contamination and how certain wet landscapes became associated with moral corruption and crime.
Victorians’ views of water and its role in how the social fabric of Victorian Britain was imagined
Water matters like few other substances in people’s daily lives. In the nineteenth century, it left its traces on politics, urban reform, and societal divisions, as well as on conceptualizations of gender roles. Drawing on the methodology of material ecocriticism, Ursula Kluwick’s Haunting Ecologies argues that Victorian Britons were keenly aware of aquatic agency, recognizing water as an active force with the ability to infiltrate bodies and spaces.
Kluwick reads works by canonical writers such as Braddon, Dickens, Stoker, and George Eliot alongside sanitary reform discourse, court cases, journalistic articles, satirical cartoons, technical drawings, paintings, and maps. This wide-ranging study sheds new light on Victorian-era anxieties about water contamination as well as on how certain wet landscapes such as sewers, rivers, and marshes became associated with moral corruption and crime. Applying ideas from the field of blue humanities to nineteenth-century texts, Haunting Ecologies argues for the relevance of realism as an Anthropocene form.
Victorians’ views of water and its role in how the social fabric of Victorian Britain was imagined
Water matters like few other substances in people’s daily lives. In the nineteenth century, it left its traces on politics, urban reform, and societal divisions, as well as on conceptualizations of gender roles. Drawing on the methodology of material ecocriticism, Ursula Kluwick’s Haunting Ecologies argues that Victorian Britons were keenly aware of aquatic agency, recognizing water as an active force with the ability to infiltrate bodies and spaces.
Kluwick reads works by canonical writers such as Braddon, Dickens, Stoker, and George Eliot alongside sanitary reform discourse, court cases, journalistic articles, satirical cartoons, technical drawings, paintings, and maps. This wide-ranging study sheds new light on Victorian-era anxieties about water contamination as well as on how certain wet landscapes such as sewers, rivers, and marshes became associated with moral corruption and crime. Applying ideas from the field of blue humanities to nineteenth-century texts, Haunting Ecologies argues for the relevance of realism as an Anthropocene form.
Ursula Kluwick is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Bern, Switzerland, and co-editor of The Beach in Anglophone Literatures and Cultures.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Beyond Water as a Symbol
Part I. Water and Pollution
1. Aquatic Discourse in the Era of Sanitary Reform: Water, Public Health, and the River Thames
2. The Aesthetics of Pollution: Charles Dickens's (In)Sanitary Waters
Part II. Water and Transgression
3. Aquatic Social Space: The Imaginary Topography of Transgression
4. Floating Across: Water as Embodied Transgression
Conclusion: New Horizons for the Blue Humanities
Notes
Bibliography
Index
| Erscheinungsdatum | 09.05.2024 |
|---|---|
| Reihe/Serie | Victorian Literature and Culture Series |
| Zusatzinfo | 10 b&w illus. |
| Verlagsort | Charlottesville |
| Sprache | englisch |
| Maße | 156 x 235 mm |
| Gewicht | 601 g |
| Themenwelt | Kunst / Musik / Theater |
| Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Natur / Technik ► Natur / Ökologie | |
| Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik | |
| Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturgeschichte | |
| Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft | |
| ISBN-10 | 0-8139-5097-X / 081395097X |
| ISBN-13 | 978-0-8139-5097-6 / 9780813950976 |
| Zustand | Neuware |
| Informationen gemäß Produktsicherheitsverordnung (GPSR) | |
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Buch | Hardcover (2022)
Haupt Verlag
CHF 67,95
