Ecological Formalism; or, Love Among the Ruins

Abstract

The current global environmental crisis is an uncanny but perversely material aftereffect of Victorian England, the world’s first fossil-fueled industrial society and its most powerful global empire. Our entanglement with this past challenges current procedures of cultural analysis, requiring a new attention to form and method, and bridging the divide between ecological and postcolonial approaches in nineteenth-century studies. In response we propose an ecological formalism, which focuses on the category of form as a means for producing environmental and therefore political knowledge. The chapters in this volume explore how Victorian writers recognized empire and ecology as posing problems of intellectual scale and recognize that these aesthetic or formal concerns generate challenges of critical methodology.