Victorian Ecocriticism

The Politics of Place and Early Environmental Justice

Edited by Dewey W. Hall - Contributions by Julie M. Barst; Natalie Rose Cox; Michelle J. Deininger; Sue Edney; Marlee Furhrmann; Jillmarie Murphy; Adrian Tait; Laura Dassow Walls; Akemi Yoshida and Saeko Yoshikawa

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.

Lexington Books

Pages: 210 • Trim: 6¼ x 9⅜

978-1-4985-5106-9 • Hardback • October 2017 • $111.00 • (£85.00)

978-1-4985-5108-3 • Paperback • June 2019 • $50.99 • (£39.00)

978-1-4985-5107-6 • eBook • October 2017 • $48.00 • (£37.00)

Series: Ecocritical Theory and Practice

Subjects: History / Modern / 19th Century, Social Science / World / Europe, Social Science / Environment

Victorian Ecocriticism

The Politics of Place and Early Environmental Justice

Hardback

Paperback

eBook

Summary

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.

Details

Lexington Books

Pages: 210 • Trim: 6¼ x 9⅜

978-1-4985-5106-9 • Hardback • October 2017 • $111.00 • (£85.00)

978-1-4985-5108-3 • Paperback • June 2019 • $50.99 • (£39.00)

978-1-4985-5107-6 • eBook • October 2017 • $48.00 • (£37.00)

Series: Ecocritical Theory and Practice

Subjects: History / Modern / 19th Century, Social Science / World / Europe, Social Science / Environment

Author

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

Table of Contents

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

Reviews

This collection of nine essays by a range of international scholars (supplemented with Hall’s helpful introduction) represents a substantial contribution to the growing body of ecocriticism focused on Victorian literature. Hall (California State Polytechnic, Pomona) takes up where he left off in his edited collection Romantic Ecocriticism: Origins and Legacies (CH, Dec'16, 54-1607), beginning with an essay on Wordsworth and the preservation of the English Lake District and going on to essays on Charlotte Brontë, Dickens, Hardy, and Trollope, among others. The volume is narrower in focus than Victorian Writers and the Environment, ed. by Laurence Mazzeno and Ronald Morrison (2017), but it complements that volume by focusing squarely on the significance of place and environmental justice in Victorian literature broadly defined, with about half the essays examining environmental conditions in Australia, Newfoundland, and the US. Though informed by recent ecocritical theory, the essays are accessible to serious readers. Highlights include Marlee Fuhrmann’s provocative essay “Seeing Soils,” which considers Thoreau and Frank Norris; Akemi Yoshida's eco-theological reading of Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies; and Michelle Deininger and Natalie Rose Cox's eco-gothic reading of Elizabeth Gaskell’s short fiction. Summing Up: Recommended. Undergraduates through faculty.
— Choice Reviews

Breaking new ground with innovative ecocritical approaches to key Victorian-period texts from across the British Empire, Dewey Hall's new collection of ten sharp, theoretically engaged essays by early and established scholars from the U.S., UK, and Japan shows how ecological theories of place and belonging produce and are produced by questions of environmental justice--a timely and important contribution to our historical understanding of the role that literature played in the emergence of these two crucial modern environmental concepts.
— Drew Hubbell, Susquehanna University

Victorian Ecocriticism: The Politics of Place and Early Environmental Justice offers a fascinating variety of perspectives upon the representation of place in Victorian literature. This engaging and eclectic collection of essays is distinctive in its focus upon themes of environmental justice that exemplify the social engagement of Victorian authors in their depiction of natural landscapes and human communities throughout the English-speaking world: from the British Isles to Australia, Newfoundland, and America. Each of these essays offers a fresh and original approach to understanding Victorian literature from an ecocritical point of view.
— James McKusick, University of Missouri-Kansas City

Victorian Ecocriticism: The Politics of Place and Early Environmental Justice offers a fascinating variety of perspectives upon the representation of place in Victorian literature. This engaging and eclectic collection of essays is distinctive in its focus upon themes of environmental justice that exemplify the social engagement of Victorian authors in their depiction of natural landscapes and human communities throughout the English-speaking world: from the British Isles to Australia, Newfoundland, and America. Each of these essays offers a fresh and original approach to understanding Victorian literature from an ecocritical point of view.
— James McKusick, University of Missouri-Kansas City

The range of locations, authors, and contexts covered by this volume underlines the ways in which Victorian economic expansion enabled the proliferation of national and international networks of environmental violence with wide-ranging social and ecological impacts…[which make] this a valuable addition to an expanding field of Victorian ecocriticm.
— Mark Frost, University of Portsmouth; Nineteenth-Century Contexts

Victorian Ecocriticism

The Politics of Place and Early Environmental Justice

Edited by Dewey W. Hall - Contributions by Julie M. Barst; Natalie Rose Cox; Michelle J. Deininger; Sue Edney; Marlee Furhrmann; Jillmarie Murphy; Adrian Tait; Laura Dassow Walls; Akemi Yoshida and Saeko Yoshikawa

Victorian Ecocriticism

The Politics of Place and Early Environmental Justice

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