This collection of essays turns to the nineteenth century in order to weigh the legacy of its holistic conception of systems and to resurrect alternative discourses of openness, permeability, and indeterminate relation. If modern ecocriticism has sometimes been hobbled by a restrictively organic, harmonious conception of how ecologies work, we wager that a return to Victorian interrogations of natural and social collectives can furnish more open, less integrated models for how assemblages operate. The nineteenth century saw both the first acceleration of anthropogenic climate change and the birth of a host of sciences-economic, social, geological, energetic, and (yes) ecological-that now struggle to address the planetary implications of that acceleration. Our growing awareness that we are now living in the long tail of this conjuncture and at the birth of the Anthropocene has prompted a re-evaluation of what we think we know about how nature and society work, and how they might work together.

The temporal structures of provincial realist novels set in extraction landscapes convey the new understanding of futurity that attended the nineteenth-century rise of an industrial system powered by a nonrenewable, diminishing stock of underground resources. Focusing on Joseph Conrad's Nostromo (1904), George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860), and Fanny Mayne's Jane Rutherford; Or, the Miners' Strike (1853), this article demonstrates how these works adapt the provincial realist novel's emphasis on social renewal by way of marriage, reproduction, and inheritance to the extraction-based society of industrial Britain, undergirded by a trajectory of depletion and exhaustion rather than renewal. These works' deviation from novelistic chrononormativity expresses a new understanding of an extraction-based present that is claimed at the expense of future generations.

This article traces the rise of modern oil culture to interlocking innovations in British fiction, political economy, natural science, and colonial capitalism. It advances a method called “transitive reading” to understand those innovations and to show how writers first conceived of oil in relation to established energy inputs such as coal. The article then reads Joseph Conrad's late masterpiece, Victory (1915), as an ambivalent artifact of the British petro-imagination. In representing the “liquidation” of overseas coal capitalism, Victory articulates a desire for freedom from carbon power, while nevertheless binding that desire to a world where petroleum or “liquid coal” was becoming increasingly constitutive of the self.

This essay presents an ecocritical analysis of Hannah Crafts's The Bondwoman's Narrative, the 1850s manuscript novel by a formerly-enslaved African American woman that was recovered by Henry Louis Gates in 2001. Examining Crafts's extensive engagement with Charles Dickens's Bleak House, it argues that Crafts's fictionalized narrative of enslavement and self-emancipation re-imagines a Victorian politics of environmental health as a critique of environmental racism. Showing how Crafts presents the material ecology of the plantation South as a site and vector of violence, it reads The Bondwoman's Narrative as resisting nineteenth-century scientific discourses of racialized immunity that sought to legitimize the systemic neglect of enslaved people in the antebellum United States.

This essay reads Gerard Manley Hopkins's poetry for its “ecological perception”: a perceptual modality involving the dynamic interaction between human bodies and environmental givens or potentialities. Linking Hopkins's syncretic ideas about perception to the psychologist J. J. Gibson's account of our sensitivity to environmental “affordances,” the essay assesses three scales of ecological perception in Hopkins (arboreal, atmospheric, apocalyptic) and stresses the particular relevance of the intermediate (atmospheric) scale for our experience of environmental crisis. In “The Blessed Virgin compared to the Air we Breathe,” Hopkins recognizes the “teleconnections” bridging global systems and specific sites without remaining rooted to the local or bioregional (arboreal) or rushing to a vantage beyond planetary confines (apocalyptic).

This essay returns to the early nineteenth-century prehistory of ecology to argue that the anthropocentrism of Victorian social novels should be understood as a deliberate, pragmatic response to the ethical dilemmas of ecological entanglement—dilemmas visible by the late eighteenth century. Interspecies entanglement and its discontents provided the cornerstone of Malthus's infamous arguments about overpopulation in the Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). Inspired by Malthus's proto-ecological vision of endless interconnection, Harriet Martineau adopted it as the plot structure of her Illustrations of Political Economy (1832–34), some of the earliest and most influential examples of industrial fiction. Later social novelists borrowed Martineau's narrative technique of disclosing community by tracing material interdependence, but they excluded relations that crossed the species barrier. Those exclusions arose not from arrogance or ignorance of humanity's dependence on other species but from the decision to bracket often unanswerable questions arising from interspecies collectivity to foreground the practical importance of attending to the urgent needs of human beings.

This essay recasts the central locale of The Mill on the Floss in order to show how the geography and society of George Eliot's novel function together as a conjoined ecological system. I show that the port at St. Ogg's is set on an estuary, and from this observation, I claim that the entanglement of multiple estuarial waters provides a formal model for the overall ecology of the novel. Referring to this system as “ecological form,” the essay shows how the characters’ misunderstanding of the estuarial nature of the St. Ogg's hydrography is the primary source of the communal divisions with which the novel is so famously riven. In so doing, this essay makes two methodological interventions, one local, and one slightly more global. In the first, I show how unsticking the progression of our criticism from that of a novel's plot—especially one with such a catastrophically strong telos as Mill’s—can allow us to view form and, particularly, geography as newly vital to literary history. This leads to the second intervention, in which I suggest that reading practices in an age of environmental collapse should look beyond disaster itself and toward affected communities’ systemic ties to those extraneous systems—economic, legal, imperial—that aid and abet disasters elsewhere and even ignore the potential for catastrophic reoccurrence in the near future. In other words, reading for water readily yields a wide-ranging map of global capitalism perhaps unexpectedly centered on a small town in Lincolnshire.

This article argues that Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor articulates a mid-nineteenth-century urban ecology that resonates with the “open” and “unfinished” form of midcentury London and Mayhew's London Labour itself. Mayhew's extensive elaboration of midcentury recycling, repurposing, and reusing practices is put into dialogue with the volumes’ print innovations and, in particular, print recycling practices. Drawing on the passage in which Mayhew describes his ecological vision most compactly—itself recycled from an earlier work—it illustrates how these volumes unite “the ragpicker” and the writer in the production of open and usable forms generative of social change.

Studies of symbiosis have been instrumental in recent thinking about bodies and ecologies as open systems. But even before the invention of symbiosis toward the end of the nineteenth century, parasitism helped scientists conceive of open ecologies marked by complex, interdependent intimacies. This essay shows how the invention of symbiosis as an umbrella term for “true parasitisms” and “non-parasitisms” helped to close off previously existing (if precarious) possibilities for reciprocality within the older concept, and suggests that the time has come for a revitalization of parasitism as a conceptual tool in the face of social and ecological crisis

Taking a long view of mycological history, this essay considers how studies of fungal life have modeled fugitive, cryptic, and queer forms of belonging that open the body and the body politic to modes of collectivity that trouble the equation of ecology with holistic closure. Turning to Arthur Machen's The Hill of Dreams, this essay shows how the geographies of desire and belonging created through fungal intimacies make it impossible to speak of either the self-contained individual or ecology in the singular. Open and plural, selves and worlds proliferate, contaminate, and interpenetrate through the infectious touch of fungal relations.

This article explores the ecology of form presented in George Eliot's novel Silas Marner. Though many have read the novel as a tight-knit account of an organic society, this author reads a more disorienting, emergent, and conflicted study of the coproduction of lives and environment. George Henry Lewes's account of physiology, particularly his discussion of epigenesis, is foundational to this disorganizing turn in Eliot's fiction. Finally, the author explores how the contingent relation between Eppie and Silas Marner underlines the recent convergence between discussions of queer futurity and the agential turn in ecocriticism.