Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0823282112 ISBN 13: 9780823282111

Publisher: Fordham University Press, 2018

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Authors

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 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.”

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).

Lynn Voskuil is Associate Professor of English at the University of Houston. She is the author of Acting Naturally: Victorian Theatricality and Authenticity (2004) and editor of Nineteenth- Century Energies: Literature, Technology, Culture (2016).

Jesse Oak Taylor is Associate Professor of English at the University of Washington. He is the author of The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf (2016) and coeditor of Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times (2017).

Edition details

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0823282112
• ISBN 13: 9780823282111
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256
• Editor: Hensley Nathan K., Steer Philip