Klappentext

Today's environmental decimation and climate crises have arisen from our drive for individual material prosperity. We even appreciate nature primarily for its fulfilment of our interests, whether economic productivity, aesthetic pleasure, or personal well-being. And yet, we still ask how we have reached this dire ecological condition and what it is that has kept us from acting effectively to maintain a thriving and diverse biosphere. This collection of essays by major scholars from around the world analyzes how the industrial, imperialist Victorian era gave rise to today's unwillingness to move beyond our acquisitive drive. But it also explores the Victorians' initiation of the modern environmentalist movement, formulation of the first legislation defending rights of nonhuman animals, and invention of literary forms for contesting environmental degradation. In this most unlikely of eras, the volume uncovers both valuable insights into the limitations of our own environmentalism and innovative suggestions for overcoming them.

Inhalt

Introduction Dennis Denisoff; Part I. The Global Imaginary: 1. Novel geologies: Victorian fiction in catastrophic times Jesse Oak Taylor; 2. Eco gothic: dislocations of scale Roger Luckhurst; 3. Entropy, exhaustion, and degeneration in science fiction and decadence Benjamin Morgan; 4. Blue ecologies Cannon Schmitt; 5. Aesthetic form and global systems Nathan K. Hensley; Part II. Imperialism and Colonialism: 6. Agricultural ecologies Grace Moore; 7. Empire, environment, and botanical art in British India Lindsay Wells; 8. The agricultural roots of realism: Lal Behari Day's Govinda Samanta Sukanya Banerjee; 9. British values, indigenous knowledge, and settler colonial environments Philip Steer; Part III. Vegetal and Animal Correlations: 10. Floral poetics Catherine Maxwell; 11. Vegetal ontology in Emily Dickinson's poetic herbarium Michael Marder; 12. Queer ecology and the animal in Walter Pater and William Sharp Dennis Denisoff; 13. Plant agency Elizabeth Chang; Part IV. Environmental Uses and Abuses: 14. A little in the mining way: Victorian literatures of extraction Elizabeth Carolyn Miller; 15. The Victorian Capitalocene: Olive Schreiner on the frontier Ella Mershon; 16. The art of extinction: naturalizing colonization and Walter Buller's A History of the Birds of New Zealand Wendy Parkins; 17. Land use: The farm, the common and the wild Carolyn Lesjak; Part V. Environmentalism: 18. Pollution Allen MacDuffie; 19. Art and environment Kate Flint; 20. Climate and empire Adeline Johns-Putra; 21. The uncomfortable commons in Lewis Carroll and William Morris Barbara Leckie; 22. Form and activism Caroline Levine.