Introduction

Summary

Much as the complexities of climate change and the Anthropocene have queried the limits and exclusions of literary representation, so, too, have the challenges recently presented by climate activism and intersectional environmentalism, animal rights, and even the ‘thing-power’ (as Jane Bennett puts it) of material forms like oil, plastic, and heavy metals. Social and protest movements have revived the question of whether there can be such a thing as an activist ecocriticism. These movements resurrect a still-unanswered question first posed by Jonathan Bate in 1991: can ecocriticism only concern itself with consciousness, or might it politicise literary criticism in a new way?

Attempting to respond, this volume coalesces around three interrelated strands: material ecologies, past and present British politics, and the act of writing itself. Contributors consider the ways in which literary form has foregrounded the complexities of both matter (in essays on water, sugar, and land) and political economics (from empire and nationalism to environmental justice movements and local and regional communities). The volume asks how life writing, nature writing, creative nonfiction, and autobiography, although genres entrenched in capitalist political realities, can also confront these by reinserting personal experience. Through such personal narratives, the volume addresses the extent to which literary ecocriticism might support Extinction Rebellion’s fifth principle, of establishing a cycle of ‘action, reflection and learning, and planning for more action’, to help repair a near fatally damaged world. Can we bring a more sustainable planet into being by focusing on those literary forms which can imagine the conditions and systems needed to do so?

The first three essays focus on place. Mark Frost looks at Victorian reworkings of the pastoral in novels by Harriet Martineau, George Eliot, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charlotte Brontë, whose innovations in genre help to reveal the operation and impact of political economy. Set in the industrialised coun tryside of the Midlands or North, the novels strip away pastoral’s idyllic idealisation of country life to reveal the ‘accelerating intersections of town and country’, and the imposition of environmental exploitation, air pollution, and economic globalisation. More broadly, they expose a mechanism of environmental sovereignty, an assumed ‘unquestioned right to do as we will with everything we describe as nonhuman and label as resource’, says Frost, a label which encompasses both industry and farming. Hence, these novels expose what Elizabeth Miller has called extractivist ecologies, a way of life that proceeds by depleting the future.