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Ecological Form

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Ecological Form brings together leading voices in nineteenth-century ecocriticism to suture the lingering divide between postcolonial and ecocritical approaches. Together, these essays show how Vic...
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  • 04 December 2018
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Ecological Form brings together leading voices in nineteenth-century ecocriticism to suture the lingering divide between postcolonial and ecocritical approaches. Together, these essays show how Victorian thinkers used aesthetic form to engage problems of system, interconnection, and dispossession that remain our own. The authors reconsider Victorian literary structures in light of environmental catastrophe; coordinate “natural” questions with sociopolitical ones; and underscore the category of form as a means for generating environmental—and therefore political—knowledge. Moving from the elegy and the industrial novel to the utopian romance, the scientific treatise, and beyond, Ecological Form demonstrates how nineteenth-century thinkers conceptualized the circuits of extraction and violence linking Britain to its global network. Yet the book’s most pressing argument is that this past thought can be a resource for reimagining the present.
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Price: $43.00
Pages: 256
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Imprint: Fordham University Press
Publication Date: 04 December 2018
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9780823282111
Format: Paperback
BISACs: LITERARY CRITICISM / Semiotics & Theory, NATURE / Ecology, HISTORY / Modern / 19th Century
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The editors have organized Ecological Form in a way that makes it into a syllabus: the categories of Method, Form, Scale, and Futures could structure a semester, and the range of literary forms—the novel, poetry, drama, and non-fiction prose--and earthly objects—indigo, water, coal, electricity--would take students across a startling range of Victorian texts and eco-political issues. A brilliant collection for researchers as well, the essays in this collection avoid the clichés of the “Anthropocene” to take a much harder look at what nineteenth-century texts and their authors were thinking about the earth and its possible and impossible futures.---Elaine Freedgood, New York University

...an elegant and deeply considered ensemble of essays, each deftly argued and rigorously researched...

Ecological Form convenes many exciting voices in a powerful demonstration of approaches now animating nineteenth-century ecocriticism. Yet this luminous collection, scrupulously edited and beautifully produced, is less invested in cordoning off another subfield than in challenging us to steep Victorian scholarship and pedagogy whole cloth with the concepts and concerns of ecological thinking understood in resolutely global terms.

This invaluable collection of essays, edited with a marvelous introduction by Philip Steer and Nathan K. Hensley, urges us to reconsider a diverse array of (mostly) nineteenth-century texts in light of the global environmental crisis often known as the “Anthropocene.” …[A]ll of the essays, in different ways, examine their chosen texts not so much for their overt environmental content or thematics...but for the ways in which that sense of unfolding catastrophe posed profound representational challenges and demanded new ways of organizing and representing human experience.---Allen MacDuffie, author of Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination, in Nineteenth-Century Literature

...carefully edited and thoughtfully constructed... Ecological Form would make an excellent primer for those new to the fields of nineteenth-century environmental or postcolonial studies, studies of literature and climate, or Victorian studies more generally. It also proves stimulating reading for those already immersed in these fields and looking to expand a syllabus or engage in areas of recent debate.
Karen Pinkus (Afterword By)
Karen Pinkus is Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. She is the author of Fuel: A Speculative Dictionary (2016), Alchemical Mercury: A Theory of Ambivalence (2009), The Montesi Scandal: The Death of Wilma Montesi and the Birth of the Paparazzi in Fellini’s Rome (2003), Picturing Silence: Emblem, Language, Counter- Reformation Materiality (1996), and Bodily Regimes: Italian Advertising Under Fascism (1995).

Nathan K. Hensley (Edited By)
Nathan K. Hensley is Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University. He is the author of Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty (2016).

Philip Steer (Edited By)
Philip Steer is Senior Lecturer in English at Massey University. His current book project is “Borders of Britishness: The Novel and Political Economy in the Victorian Settler Empire.”

Introduction: Ecological Formalism; or, Love among the Ruins
Nathan K. Hensley and Philip Steer, 1

Part I Method

1. Drama, Ecology, and the Ground of Empire: The Play of Indigo
Sukanya Banerjee, 21

2. Mourning Species: In Memoriam in an Age of Extinction
Jesse Oak Taylor, 42

3. Signatures of the Carboniferous: The Literary Forms of Coal
Nathan K. Hensley and Philip Steer, 63

Part II Form

4. Fixed Capital and the Flow: Water Power, Steam Power, and The Mill on the Floss
Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, 85

5. “Form Against Force”: Sustainability and Organicism in the Work of John Ruskin
Deanna K. Kreisel, 101

6. Mapping the “Invisible Region, Far Away” in Dombey and Son
Adam Grener, 121

Part III Scale

7. How We Might Live: Utopian Ecology in William Morris and Samuel Butler
Benjamin Morgan, 139

8. From Specimen to System: Botanical Scale and the Environmental Sublime in Joseph Dalton Hooker’s Himalayas
Lynn Voskuil, 161

9. “Infi nitesimal Lives”: Thomas Hardy’s Scale Effects
Aaron Rosenberg, 182

Part IV Futures

10. Electric Dialectics: Delany’s Atlantic Materialism
Monique Allewaert, 203

11. Satire’s Ecology
Teresa Shewry, 223

Afterword: They Would Have Ended by Burning Their Own Globe
Karen Pinkus, 241

Acknowledgments 249

List of Contributors 251

Index 253