Energy, Ecocriticism, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction

Energy, Ecocriticism, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction PDF Author: Barri J. Gold
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030686043
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Energy, Ecocriticism, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Novel Ecologies draws on energy concepts to revisit some of our favorite books—Mansfield Park, Jane Eyre, Great Expectations, and The War of the Worlds—and the ways these shape our sense of ourselves as ecological beings. Barri J. Gold regards the laws of thermodynamics not solely as a set of physical principles, but also as a cultural and conceptual form that we can use to reimagine our historically vexed relationship to the natural world. Beginning with an examination of the parallel inceptions of energy and ecology in the mid-nineteenth century, this book considers the question of how we may better read and interpret our world, developing a recipe for experimental reading and insisting upon the importance of literary studies in a world driving to ecological catastrophe.

Energy, Ecocriticism, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction

Energy, Ecocriticism, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction PDF Author: Barri J. Gold
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030686043
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 220

Get Book Here

Book Description
Energy, Ecocriticism, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Novel Ecologies draws on energy concepts to revisit some of our favorite books—Mansfield Park, Jane Eyre, Great Expectations, and The War of the Worlds—and the ways these shape our sense of ourselves as ecological beings. Barri J. Gold regards the laws of thermodynamics not solely as a set of physical principles, but also as a cultural and conceptual form that we can use to reimagine our historically vexed relationship to the natural world. Beginning with an examination of the parallel inceptions of energy and ecology in the mid-nineteenth century, this book considers the question of how we may better read and interpret our world, developing a recipe for experimental reading and insisting upon the importance of literary studies in a world driving to ecological catastrophe.

Environment and Ecology in the Long Nineteenth-Century

Environment and Ecology in the Long Nineteenth-Century PDF Author: Mark Frost
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040134297
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 771

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Book Description
This volume includes sources relating to a range of social and cultural contexts, including the proliferation of natural history crazes (ferns, aquaria, orchids, etc); debates about the social and environmental impacts of changing land use in town and country; debates about demographics, population, and resources inspired by Thomas Malthus; attempts to preserve landscapes (e.g., The Commons Preservation Society), debates about hunger, poverty, and disease in the countryside, particularly during the ‘Hungry Forties’, and relating to the Captain Swing and Chartist disturbances; the rise of land Utopianism and rural Utopian community projects; the rise of new forms of rural leisure; aesthetic engagements with rural enviroments and new world travel; and debates about pollution (especially water pollution). The volume will also turn to a range of literary sources from the period prior to 1858 to illustrate the ways in which changing attitudes to environments emerged in fiction. These include extracts from Dickens’s early works, the hunting novels of R. S. Surtees, the social novels of Harriet Martineau, Charlotte Tonna, Charles Kingsley and Margaret Oliphant, John Ruskin’s environmental fairytale, ‘The King of the Golden River’, chartist fiction, Victorian children’s fiction, and adventure novels.

Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination

Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination PDF Author: Allen MacDuffie
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139993291
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
Reading Victorian literature and science in tandem, Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination investigates how the concept of energy was fictionalized - both mystified and demystified - during the rise of a new resource-intensive industrial and economic order. The first extended study of a burgeoning area of critical interest of increasing importance to twenty-first-century scholarship, it anchors its investigation at the very roots of the energy problem, in a period that first articulated questions about sustainability, the limits to growth, and the implications of energy pollution for the entire global environment. With chapters on Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad and H. G. Wells, Allen MacDuffie discusses the representation of urban environments in the literary imaginary, and how those texts helped reveal the gap between cultural fantasies of unbounded energy generation, and the material limits imposed by nature.

The Routledge Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Science

The Routledge Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Science PDF Author: John Holmes
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317042344
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 479

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Book Description
Tracing the continuities and trends in the complex relationship between literature and science in the long nineteenth century, this companion provides scholars with a comprehensive, authoritative and up-to-date foundation for research in this field. In intellectual, material and social terms, the transformation undergone by Western culture over the period was unprecedented. Many of these changes were grounded in the growth of science. Yet science was not a cultural monolith then any more than it is now, and its development was shaped by competing world views. To cover the full range of literary engagements with science in the nineteenth century, this companion consists of twenty-seven chapters by experts in the field, which explore crucial social and intellectual contexts for the interactions between literature and science, how science affected different genres of writing, and the importance of individual scientific disciplines and concepts within literary culture. Each chapter has its own extensive bibliography. The volume as a whole is rounded out with a synoptic introduction by the editors and an afterword by the eminent historian of nineteenth-century science Bernard Lightman.

Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion

Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion PDF Author: Elizabeth Carolyn Miller
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691205531
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
How literature of the British imperial world contended with the social and environmental consequences of industrial mining The 1830s to the 1930s saw the rise of large-scale industrial mining in the British imperial world. Elizabeth Carolyn Miller examines how literature of this era reckoned with a new vision of civilization where humans are dependent on finite, nonrenewable stores of earthly resources, and traces how the threatening horizon of resource exhaustion worked its way into narrative form. Britain was the first nation to transition to industry based on fossil fuels, which put its novelists and other writers in the remarkable position of mediating the emergence of extraction-based life. Miller looks at works like Hard Times, The Mill on the Floss, and Sons and Lovers, showing how the provincial realist novel’s longstanding reliance on marriage and inheritance plots transforms against the backdrop of exhaustion to withhold the promise of reproductive futurity. She explores how adventure stories like Treasure Island and Heart of Darkness reorient fictional space toward the resource frontier. And she shows how utopian and fantasy works like “Sultana’s Dream,” The Time Machine, and The Hobbit offer imaginative ways of envisioning energy beyond extractivism. This illuminating book reveals how an era marked by violent mineral resource rushes gave rise to literary forms and genres that extend extractivism as a mode of environmental understanding.

Empire and the Animal Body

Empire and the Animal Body PDF Author: John Miller
Publisher: Anthem Press
ISBN: 0857285491
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
‘Empire and the Animal Body: Violence, Identity and Ecology in Victorian Adventure Fiction’ develops recent work in animal studies, eco-criticism and postcolonial studies to reassess the significance of exotic animals in Victorian adventure literature. Depictions of violence against animals were integral to the ideology of adventure literature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, the evolutionary hierarchies on which such texts relied were complicated by developing environmental sensitivities and reimaginings of human selfhood in relation to animal others. As these texts hankered after increasingly imperilled areas of wilderness, the border between human and animal appeared tense, ambivalent and problematic.

Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination

Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination PDF Author: Allen MacDuffie
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107064376
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
This book explores how Victorian fiction helped create an environmental consciousness by articulating questions about sustainable energy use.

Ecocriticism and the Anthropocene in Nineteenth-Century Art and Visual Culture

Ecocriticism and the Anthropocene in Nineteenth-Century Art and Visual Culture PDF Author: Maura Coughlin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429602391
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
In this volume, emerging and established scholars bring ethical and political concerns for the environment, nonhuman animals and social justice to the study of nineteenth-century visual culture. They draw their theoretical inspiration from the vitality of emerging critical discourses, such as new materialism, ecofeminism, critical animal studies, food studies, object-oriented ontology and affect theory. This timely volume looks back at the early decades of the Anthropocene to query the agency of visual culture to critique, create and maintain more resilient and biologically diverse local and global ecologies.

ThermoPoetics

ThermoPoetics PDF Author: Barri J. Gold
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262288273
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 357

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Book Description
An engaging exploration of the mutually productive interaction of literature and energy science in the Victorian era, as seen in Tennyson, Dickens, Stoker, and others. In ThermoPoetics, Barri Gold sets out to show us how analogous, intertwined, and mutually productive poetry and physics may be. Charting the simultaneous emergence of the laws of thermodynamics in literature and in physics that began in the 1830s, Gold finds that not only can science influence literature, but literature can influence science, especially in the early stages of intellectual development. Nineteenth-century physics was often conducted in words. And, Gold claims, a poet could be a genius in thermodynamics and a novelist could be a damn good engineer. Gold's lively readings of works by Alfred Tennyson, Charles Dickens, Herbert Spencer, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, and others offer a decidedly literary introduction to such elements of thermodynamic thought as conservation and dissipation, the linguistic tension between force and energy, the quest for a grand unified theory, strategies for coping within an inexorably entropic universe, and the demonic potential of the thermodynamically savvy individual. Gold shows us that in A Tale of Two Cities, for example, Dickens produces order in spite of the universal drive to entropy; Wilde's Dorian Gray and Stoker's Dracula, on the other hand, reveal the creative potential of chaos. Victorian literature embraced the language and ideas of energy physics to address the era's concerns about religion, evolution, race, class, empire, gender, and sexuality. Gold argues that these concerns, in turn, shaped the hopes and fears expressed about the new physics.

Writing the Environment in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Writing the Environment in Nineteenth-Century American Literature PDF Author: Steven Petersheim
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498508383
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
The nineteenth-century roots of environmental writing in American literature are often mentioned in passing and sometimes studied piece by piece. Writing the Environment in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: The Ecological Awareness of Early Scribes of Nature brings together numerous explorations of environmentally-aware writing across the genres of nineteenth-century literature. Like Lawrence Buell, the authors of this collection find Thoreau’s writing a touchstone of nineteenth-century environmental writing, particularly focusing on Thoreau’s claim that humans may function as “scribes of nature.” However, these studies of Thoreau’s antecedents, contemporaries, and successors also reveal a range of other writers in the nineteenth century whose literary treatments of nature are often more environmentally attuned than most readers have noticed. The writers whose works are studied in this collection include canonical and forgotten writers, men and women, early nineteenth-century and late nineteenth-century authors, pioneers and conservationists. They drew attention to the conflicted relationships between humans and the American continent, as experienced by Native Americans and European Americans. Taken together, these essays offer a fresh perspective on the roots of environmental literature in nineteenth-century American nonfiction, fiction, and poetry as well as in multi-genre compositions such as the travel writings of Margaret Fuller. Bringing largely forgotten voices such as John Godman alongside canonical voices such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson, the authors whose writings are studied in this collection produced a diverse tapestry of nascent American environmental writing in the nineteenth-century. From early nineteenth-century writers such as poet Philip Freneau and novelist Charles Brockden Brown to later nineteenth-century conservationists such as John James Audubon and John Muir, Scribes of Nature shows the development of an environmental consciousness and a growing conservationist ethos in American literature. Given their often surprisingly healthy respect for the natural environment, these nineteenth-century writers offer us much to consider in an age of environmental crisis. The complexities of the supposed nature/culture divide still work into our lives today as economic and environmental issues are often seen at loggerheads when they ought to be seen as part of the same conversation of what it means to live healthy lives, and to pass on a healthy world to those who follow us in a world where human activity is becoming increasingly threatening to the health of our planet.