Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-lnqnp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-24T15:56:08.206Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

WHERE IS VICTORIAN ECOCRITICISM?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2015

Jesse Oak Taylor
Jesse Oak Taylor*
Affiliation:
University of Washington
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The most striking thing about reviewing the field of Victorian ecocriticism is that there is so little of it. This relative absence is all the more perplexing given that ecocritical work on Romanticism and nineteenth-century American literature is so profuse. Thoreau and Wordsworth remain the most-discussed authors in a field that was in many respects inaugurated by Jonathan Bate's Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (1991) and Lawrence Buell's The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing and the Formation of American Culture (1995). Romanticism remains the point of departure for some of the most influential studies in the field, including those like Timothy Morton's Ecology Without Nature (2009) that challenge many of its core precepts. Meanwhile, ecocriticism has expanded to include many other periods and regions, with collections ranging from The Ecocritical Shakespeare (2011) to Postcolonial Ecologies (2011), and unsurprisingly, a strong turn toward the contemporary.

Type
Review Essay
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 43 , Issue 4 , December 2015 , pp. 877 - 894
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CONSIDERED

Armstrong, Isobel. Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination 1830–1880. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008.Google Scholar
Bate, Jonathan. Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition. London: Routledge, 1991.Google Scholar
Bate, Jonathan. The Song of the Earth. London: Picador, 2000.Google Scholar
Boes, Tobias, and Marshall, Kate. “Writing the Anthropocene: An Introduction.” minnesota review 83 (2014): 60–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brayton, Dan. Shakespeare's Ocean. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2012.Google Scholar
Bruckner, Lynne, and Brayton, Dan. The Ecocritical Shakespeare. Burlington: Ashgate, 2011.Google Scholar
Buckland, Adelene. Novel Science: Fiction and the Invention of Nineteenth-Century Geology. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995.Google Scholar
Buell, Lawrence. Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U. S. and Beyond. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2001.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35. 2 (Winter 2009): 197–222.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cohen, William A. “Arborealities: The Tactile Ecology of Hardy's Woodlanders.” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 19 (2014): 1–19.Google Scholar
Crutzen, Paul J. “Geology of Mankind.” Nature 415.6867 (Jan. 2002): 23.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Davis, Mike. Planet of Slums. London: Verso, 2006.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
DeLoughrey, Elizabeth, and Handley, George, eds. Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Freedgood, Elaine. The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gairn, Louisa. Ecology and Modern Scottish Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2008.Google Scholar
Hess, Scott. William Wordsworth and the Ecology of Authorship: The Roots of Environmentalism in Nineteenth-Century Culture. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2012.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kolbert, Elizabeth. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. New York: Henry Holt, 2014.Google Scholar
MacDuffie, Allen. Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2014.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacKenzie, John M.The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1988.Google Scholar
Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2010.Google Scholar
Morton, Timothy. Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2009.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mukherjee, Upamanyu Pablo. Natural Disasters and Victorian Empire: Famines, Fevers and the Literary Cultures of South Asia. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mukherjee, Upamanyu Pablo. Postcolonial Environments: Nature, Culture, and the Contemporary Indian Novel in English. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nichols, Ashton. Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism: Towards Urbannatural Roosting. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nixon, Rob. “The Anthropocene: The Promise and Pitfalls of an Epochal Idea.” Edgeeffect.net. Blog post. 6 Nov. 2014.Google Scholar
Pizzo, Justine. “Esther's Ether: Atmospheric Character in Charles Dickens's Bleak House.” Victorian Literature and Culture 42.1 (2014): 81–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Quammen, David. The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction. New York: Scribner, 1997.Google Scholar
Taylor, Jesse Oak. “The Novel as Climate Model: Reading the Greenhouse Effect in Bleak House.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 46.1 (Spring 2013): 1–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Taylor, William M.The Vital Landscape: Nature and the Built Environment in Nineteenth Century Britain. Burlington: Ashgate, 2004.Google Scholar
Thorsheim, Peter. Inventing Pollution: Coal, Smoke, and Culture in Britain since 1800. Athens: Ohio UP, 2006.Google Scholar
Winter, James. Secure from Rash Assault: Sustaining the Victorian Environment. Berkeley: U of California P, 1999.CrossRefGoogle Scholar