Pub Date : 2018-12-04DOI: 10.5422/fordham/9780823282128.003.0007
Adam Grener
This essay analyzes the relationship between empire and ecology in Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1846-48) in order to identify problems of representation that accompany the Victorian novel’s effort to grasp global systems, highlighting the methodological differences between ecological and symptomatic readings of the novel. Although Dombey’s failure to directly represent the “invisible regions” of empire problematizes its rhetoric of economic and domestic reform, this essay argues that its reliance upon the atmosphere and weather as mediating images foregrounds the imaginative structures necessary to understand the imperial underpinnings of domestic locales. The logic of the novel’s atmospheric and meteorological imagery shows the ways in which realism relies upon both metaphor and metonymy to represent systematic interconnection on a global scale.
{"title":"Mapping the “Invisible Region, Far Away” in Dombey and Son","authors":"Adam Grener","doi":"10.5422/fordham/9780823282128.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5422/fordham/9780823282128.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"This essay analyzes the relationship between empire and ecology in Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1846-48) in order to identify problems of representation that accompany the Victorian novel’s effort to grasp global systems, highlighting the methodological differences between ecological and symptomatic readings of the novel. Although Dombey’s failure to directly represent the “invisible regions” of empire problematizes its rhetoric of economic and domestic reform, this essay argues that its reliance upon the atmosphere and weather as mediating images foregrounds the imaginative structures necessary to understand the imperial underpinnings of domestic locales. The logic of the novel’s atmospheric and meteorological imagery shows the ways in which realism relies upon both metaphor and metonymy to represent systematic interconnection on a global scale.","PeriodicalId":213745,"journal":{"name":"Ecological Form","volume":"66 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-12-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130058050","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-12-04DOI: 10.5422/fordham/9780823282128.003.0001
Nathan K. Hensley, P. Steer
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.
{"title":"Ecological Formalism; or, Love Among the Ruins","authors":"Nathan K. Hensley, P. Steer","doi":"10.5422/fordham/9780823282128.003.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5422/fordham/9780823282128.003.0001","url":null,"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.","PeriodicalId":213745,"journal":{"name":"Ecological Form","volume":"51 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-12-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117251545","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-12-04DOI: 10.5422/fordham/9780823282128.003.0010
Aaron Rosenberg
This essay demonstrates how inhuman scales—immense measurements of space and time—pose representational challenges for narrative forms. It focuses on Thomas Hardy’s efforts to represent scales that seemed outsized to the realist novel’s conventional focus on the daily lives of individuals. Narrating realities beyond the scope of realism, I argue, led Hardy to experiment with formal alternatives including romance and melodrama—genres associated with a mode of excess. Romances like Two on a Tower and A Pair of Blue Eyes accommodate the immense perspectives of scientific observation by shifting into a heightened mode of representation, producing distinctive “scale effects.” This essay ultimately proposes that questions of scale are key to rethinking the role of genre in Hardy’s works and Hardy’s status within the realist tradition.
{"title":"“Infinitesimal Lives” Thomas Hardy’s Scale Effects","authors":"Aaron Rosenberg","doi":"10.5422/fordham/9780823282128.003.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5422/fordham/9780823282128.003.0010","url":null,"abstract":"This essay demonstrates how inhuman scales—immense measurements of space and time—pose representational challenges for narrative forms. It focuses on Thomas Hardy’s efforts to represent scales that seemed outsized to the realist novel’s conventional focus on the daily lives of individuals. Narrating realities beyond the scope of realism, I argue, led Hardy to experiment with formal alternatives including romance and melodrama—genres associated with a mode of excess. Romances like Two on a Tower and A Pair of Blue Eyes accommodate the immense perspectives of scientific observation by shifting into a heightened mode of representation, producing distinctive “scale effects.” This essay ultimately proposes that questions of scale are key to rethinking the role of genre in Hardy’s works and Hardy’s status within the realist tradition.","PeriodicalId":213745,"journal":{"name":"Ecological Form","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-12-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126543399","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-12-04DOI: 10.5422/fordham/9780823282128.003.0006
Deanna K. Kreisel
This essay considers art critic, environmental reformer, and heterodox political economist John Ruskin as an early sustainability theorist through an examination of his commitment to organicism. That commitment manifests in Ruskin’s struggle to differentiate the living from the non-living, most evident in his writings on crystals, leaves, and iron: “The Work of Iron, In Nature, Art, and Policy” (1858) and The Ethics of Dust (1866). This struggle is discussed in the context of his heterdox political economy as an early demand theorist, and his idiosyncratic writings on economic value as inhering in anything that avails “toward life.” By arguing that Ruskin is an important precursor to contemporary ecocritical discourse, it complicates recent critical readings of Ruskin’s anthropocentrism and instrumental aesthetics.
{"title":"“Form Against Force”","authors":"Deanna K. Kreisel","doi":"10.5422/fordham/9780823282128.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5422/fordham/9780823282128.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"This essay considers art critic, environmental reformer, and heterodox political economist John Ruskin as an early sustainability theorist through an examination of his commitment to organicism. That commitment manifests in Ruskin’s struggle to differentiate the living from the non-living, most evident in his writings on crystals, leaves, and iron: “The Work of Iron, In Nature, Art, and Policy” (1858) and The Ethics of Dust (1866). This struggle is discussed in the context of his heterdox political economy as an early demand theorist, and his idiosyncratic writings on economic value as inhering in anything that avails “toward life.” By arguing that Ruskin is an important precursor to contemporary ecocritical discourse, it complicates recent critical readings of Ruskin’s anthropocentrism and instrumental aesthetics.","PeriodicalId":213745,"journal":{"name":"Ecological Form","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-12-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123964370","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-12-04DOI: 10.5422/fordham/9780823282128.003.0004
Nathan K. Hensley, P. Steer
This essay revises existing accounts of the Victorian novel by locating it within the coal-powered energy system that increasingly made it possible. Revisiting our most familiar accounts of mediation, we explore how coal energy might be visible in cultural productions unable or unwilling to engage this system, as a system, directly. Through readings of Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South and Cranford, J. R. Seeley’s The Expansion of England, and Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo, we argue that “coal form” can be glimpsed in texts that imagine the transgression of bounded systems of belonging, and in formal affinities across what otherwise seem discrete categories of genre and geography. Ultimately, this analysis suggests that coal has also infused, invisibly yet pervasively, some of our most enduring categories of criticism as well.
{"title":"Signatures of the Carboniferous The Literary Forms of Coal","authors":"Nathan K. Hensley, P. Steer","doi":"10.5422/fordham/9780823282128.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5422/fordham/9780823282128.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"This essay revises existing accounts of the Victorian novel by locating it within the coal-powered energy system that increasingly made it possible. Revisiting our most familiar accounts of mediation, we explore how coal energy might be visible in cultural productions unable or unwilling to engage this system, as a system, directly. Through readings of Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South and Cranford, J. R. Seeley’s The Expansion of England, and Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo, we argue that “coal form” can be glimpsed in texts that imagine the transgression of bounded systems of belonging, and in formal affinities across what otherwise seem discrete categories of genre and geography. Ultimately, this analysis suggests that coal has also infused, invisibly yet pervasively, some of our most enduring categories of criticism as well.","PeriodicalId":213745,"journal":{"name":"Ecological Form","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-12-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123636836","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-12-04DOI: 10.5422/fordham/9780823282128.003.0003
Jesse. Taylor
This chapter develops a reading practice for the Anthropocene by tracing the reflections on extinction that recur throughout Alfred Tennyson’s magisterial elegy, In Memoriam (1850). It asks how the poem’s treatment of extinction changes when it is read as an account of anthropogenic extinction, the decimation of species arising explicitly from human action and linked (both metaphorically and literally) to imperial conquest. In so doing, it traces the emergence of a new kind of human “species being,” that is, the human as geophysical force within the Earth system, which appears in the poem through extended metaphors linking human evolution to industrial processes and imperial conquest thus speaking to one of the most difficult (and controversial) challenges that the Anthropocene lays before the humanities: thinking the human in species terms. In the process, the chapter makes a case for elegy as both an ethical and political stance complement to conservation.
{"title":"Mourning Species","authors":"Jesse. Taylor","doi":"10.5422/fordham/9780823282128.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5422/fordham/9780823282128.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter develops a reading practice for the Anthropocene by tracing the reflections on extinction that recur throughout Alfred Tennyson’s magisterial elegy, In Memoriam (1850). It asks how the poem’s treatment of extinction changes when it is read as an account of anthropogenic extinction, the decimation of species arising explicitly from human action and linked (both metaphorically and literally) to imperial conquest. In so doing, it traces the emergence of a new kind of human “species being,” that is, the human as geophysical force within the Earth system, which appears in the poem through extended metaphors linking human evolution to industrial processes and imperial conquest thus speaking to one of the most difficult (and controversial) challenges that the Anthropocene lays before the humanities: thinking the human in species terms. In the process, the chapter makes a case for elegy as both an ethical and political stance complement to conservation.","PeriodicalId":213745,"journal":{"name":"Ecological Form","volume":"61 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-12-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133093447","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-12-04DOI: 10.5422/fordham/9780823282128.003.0013
Karen Pinkus
A speculative essay that asks how we might read Jules Verne’s The Black Indies (Les indes noires) (1877), and especially its fantasies about coal, during the time of climate change. The chapter reflects on the embeddedness of a certain kind of nineteenth-century narrative of progress in the imaginary of humans today, living on the surface of a rapidly changing planet. To cut ourselves off from such a narrative may require acts of violent disruption.
{"title":"They Would Have Ended by Burning Their Own Globe","authors":"Karen Pinkus","doi":"10.5422/fordham/9780823282128.003.0013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5422/fordham/9780823282128.003.0013","url":null,"abstract":"A speculative essay that asks how we might read Jules Verne’s The Black Indies (Les indes noires) (1877), and especially its fantasies about coal, during the time of climate change. The chapter reflects on the embeddedness of a certain kind of nineteenth-century narrative of progress in the imaginary of humans today, living on the surface of a rapidly changing planet. To cut ourselves off from such a narrative may require acts of violent disruption.","PeriodicalId":213745,"journal":{"name":"Ecological Form","volume":"30 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-12-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122224308","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-12-04DOI: 10.5422/fordham/9780823282128.003.0009
L. Voskuil
The discipline of nineteenth-century botany was central both to the British imperial project and to the development of global theory. This article shows how the work of botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817–1911) advanced certain concepts of globalization by exploring scale relationships in two mid-century texts—a systematic botany, Flora Indica (1855), and a travel narrative, Himalayan Journals (1854)—and by analyzing in particular the methodologies that link individual botanical species and their global distribution. In doing so, he drew upon tropes of the sublime and related aesthetic techniques to raise crucial hermeneutical questions and to perform an important scale critique. His contributions underscore the need for new scale critiques in the humanities today and the recognition that such critiques have significant antecedents in the work of nineteenth-century writers and scientists.
{"title":"From Specimen to System","authors":"L. Voskuil","doi":"10.5422/fordham/9780823282128.003.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5422/fordham/9780823282128.003.0009","url":null,"abstract":"The discipline of nineteenth-century botany was central both to the British imperial project and to the development of global theory. This article shows how the work of botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817–1911) advanced certain concepts of globalization by exploring scale relationships in two mid-century texts—a systematic botany, Flora Indica (1855), and a travel narrative, Himalayan Journals (1854)—and by analyzing in particular the methodologies that link individual botanical species and their global distribution. In doing so, he drew upon tropes of the sublime and related aesthetic techniques to raise crucial hermeneutical questions and to perform an important scale critique. His contributions underscore the need for new scale critiques in the humanities today and the recognition that such critiques have significant antecedents in the work of nineteenth-century writers and scientists.","PeriodicalId":213745,"journal":{"name":"Ecological Form","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-12-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122318509","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-12-04DOI: 10.5422/fordham/9780823282128.003.0002
Sukanya Banerjee
By reading a mid–nineteenth-century Bengali play about indigo cultivation, Neel Darpan, this essay argues for the salience of drama—an overlooked form in Victorian studies—to ecocritical discussions. The essay also considers how the irreducibly ecological nature of colonialism recalibrates our analytical objects and impulses. In bringing ecology together with drama, the essay arrives at an idiom of “groundedness” as a critical imperative for ecologically minded scholarship, not least on empire.
{"title":"Drama, Ecology, and the Ground of Empire The Play of Indigo","authors":"Sukanya Banerjee","doi":"10.5422/fordham/9780823282128.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5422/fordham/9780823282128.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"By reading a mid–nineteenth-century Bengali play about indigo cultivation, Neel Darpan, this essay argues for the salience of drama—an overlooked form in Victorian studies—to ecocritical discussions. The essay also considers how the irreducibly ecological nature of colonialism recalibrates our analytical objects and impulses. In bringing ecology together with drama, the essay arrives at an idiom of “groundedness” as a critical imperative for ecologically minded scholarship, not least on empire.","PeriodicalId":213745,"journal":{"name":"Ecological Form","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-12-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133588039","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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