Energy, Ecocriticism, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Novel Ecologies draws on energy concepts to revisit some of our favorite booksMansfield Park, Jane Eyre, Great Expectations, and The War of the Worldsand the ways these shape our sense of ourselves as ecological beings. Barri J. Gold regards the laws of thermodynamics not solely as a set of physical principles, but also as a cultural and conceptual form that we can use to reimagine our historically vexed relationship to the natural world. Beginning with an examination of the parallel inceptions of energy and ecology in the mid-nineteenth century, this book considers the question of how we may better read and interpret our world, developing a recipe for experimental reading and insisting upon the importance of literary studies in a world driving to ecological catastrophe.

Winner of the 2021 British Society for Literature and Science Book Prize Situates literary scholarship within the broader energy discourses Contributes to the developing field of the energy humanities

Autorentext

Barri J. Gold is Professor and Chair of English at Muhlenberg College, USA, and author of ThermoPoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature and Science (2010).

Klappentext

Energy, Ecocriticism, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Novel Ecologies draws on energy concepts to revisit some of our favorite books Mansfield Park, Jane Eyre, Great Expectations, and The War of the Worlds and the ways these shape our sense of ourselves as ecological beings. Barri J. Gold regards the laws of thermodynamics not solely as a set of physical principles, but also as a cultural and conceptual form that we can use to reimagine our historically vexed relationship to the natural world. Beginning with an examination of the parallel inceptions of energy and ecology in the mid-nineteenth century, this book considers the question of how we may better read and interpret our world, developing a recipe for experimental reading and insisting upon the importance of literary studies in a world driving to ecological catastrophe.

Inhalt

1. Introduction: Experiments in Novel Ecologies.- 2. Austen's Emergent Ecologies.- 3. A Fundamentally Unheroic Kind of Story: Jane Eyre, the liberal subject, and the problem of ecology.- 4. Energy, Evolution, Ecology.- 5. From the Marshes to the Garden: Toxicity and Closure in Great Expectations.- 6. Environmental Catastrophe, Provisional Disillusionment and The War of the Worlds.