Ecological form : : system and aesthetics in the age of empire / / Nathan K. Hensley and Philip Steer, editors.

• Superior document: Fordham scholarship online
• TeilnehmendeR: Steer, Philip, 1979-; Hensley, Nathan K.,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, New York : : Fordham University Press,, [2019]; ©2019
• Year of Publication: 2019
• Edition: First edition.
• Language: English
• Series: Fordham scholarship online.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (273 pages)
• Notes: This edition previously issued in print: 2018.

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.

Table of Contents

Introduction : ecological formalism; or, Love among the ruins / Nathan K. Hensley and Philip Steer -- Drama, ecology, and the ground of empire : the play of indigo / Sukanya Banerjee -- Mourning species : in memoriam in an age of extinction / Jesse Oak Taylor -- Signatures of the carboniferous : the literary forms of coal / Nathan K. Hensley and Philip Steer -- Fixed capital and the flow : water power, steam power, and The mill on the floss / Elizabeth Carolyn Miller -- "Form against force" : sustainability and organicism in the work of John Ruskin / Deanna K. Kreisel -- Mapping the "invisible region, far away" in Dombey and Son / Adam Grener -- How we might live : utopian ecology in William Morris and Samuel Butler / Benjamin Morgan -- From specimen to system : botanical scale and the environmental sublime in Joseph Dalton Hooker's Himalayas / Lynn Voskuil -- "Infinitesimal lives" : Thomas Hardy's scale effects / Aaron Rosenberg -- Electric dialectics : Delany's Atlantic materialism / Monique Allewaert -- Satire's ecology / Teresa Shewry -- Afterword : "they would have ended by burning their own Globe" / Karen Pinkus.