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.
- Cover
- ECOLOGICAL FORM
- Title
- Copyright
- CONTENTS
- Introduction: Ecological Formalism; or, Love among the Ruins
- Part I METHOD
- 1. Drama, Ecology, and the Ground of Empire: The Play of Indigo
- 2. Mourning Species: In Memoriam in an Age of Extinction
- 3. Signatures of the Carboniferous: The Literary Forms of Coal
- Part II FORM
- 4. Fixed Capital and the Flow: Water Power, Steam Power, and The Mill on the Floss
- 5. “Form Against Force”: Sustainability and Organicism in the Work of John Ruskin
- 6. Mapping the “Invisible Region, Far Away” in Dombey and Son
- Part III SCALE
- 7. How We Might Live: Utopian Ecology in William Morris and Samuel Butler
- 8. From Specimen to System: Botanical Scale and the Environmental Sublime in Joseph Dalton Hooker’s Himalayas
- 9. “Infinitesimal Lives”: Thomas Hardy’s Scale Effects
- Part IV FUTURES
- 10. Electric Dialectics: Delany’s Atlantic Materialism
- 11. Satire’s Ecology
- Afterword: They Would Have Ended by Burning Their Own Globe
- Acknowledgments
- List of Contributors
- Index
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