Overview
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.
Full Product Details
Author: Nathan K. Hensley ,
Philip Steer ,
Karen Pinkus ,
Nathan K. Hensley
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Imprint: Fordham University Press
ISBN: 9780823282128
ISBN 10: 0823282120
Pages: 256
Publication Date: 04 December 2018
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: In Print
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Reviews
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 cliches 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... * Resurgence Magazine * 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. * Nineteenth-Century Contexts * 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
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 clich s 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
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 cliches 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... * Resurgence Magazine * 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 cliches 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
Author Information
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.”
