Critical hydrography in the long nineteenth century

Abstract

This essay canvasses a variety of approaches to the cultural and literary study of water in recent historical eras. While various aqueously-minded approaches have been presented in recent decades, they have not been fully integrated into the ecological mainstream of environmental humanist criticism, particularly in nineteenth-century studies. This essay integrates discourses across geography, geology, cultural studies, and literary studies in order to theorize critical hydrography, an aqueous approach to cultural objects that apprehends water as an ecological domain influencing both method's design and its attentions. The essay shows how critical hydrography reflexively attaches itself to histories of race, empire, and capital in apprehending the scientific filiations of the environmental humanities. Critical hydrography conceptualizes water as method to raise its visibility in ecocritical discourse.