Haunting Ecologies : Victorian Conceptions of Water / Ursula Kluwick.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Kluwick, Ursula, 1977- author.

Series:

Victorian muse.

Victorian Literature and Culture Series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English literature--19th century--History and criticism.

English literature.

Ecocriticism.

Pollution in literature.

Water--Pollution--Great Britain.

Water.

Water in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xv, 252 pages) : illustrations.

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Charlottesville, VA : University of Virginia Press, [2024]

Summary:

"Victorians' views of water and its role in how the social fabric of Victorian Britain was imagined Water matters like few other substances in people's daily lives. In the nineteenth century, it left its traces on politics, urban reform, and societal divisions, as well as on conceptualizations of gender roles. Drawing on the methodology of material ecocriticism, Ursula Kluwick's Haunting Ecologies argues that Victorian Britons were keenly aware of aquatic agency, recognizing water as an active force with the ability to infiltrate bodies and spaces. Kluwick reads works by canonical writers such as Braddon, Dickens, Stoker, and George Eliot alongside sanitary reform discourse, court cases, journalistic articles, satirical cartoons, technical drawings, paintings, and maps. This wide-ranging study sheds new light on Victorian-era anxieties about water contamination as well as on how certain wet landscapes such as sewers, rivers, and marshes became associated with moral corruption and crime. Applying ideas from the field of blue humanities to nineteenth-century texts, Haunting Ecologies argues for the relevance of realism as an Anthropocene form"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Introduction : Beyond water as a symbol

Part I. Water and pollution

1. Aquatic discourse in the era of sanitary reform : Water, public health, and the River Thames

2. The aesthetics of pollution : Charles Dickens's (In)Sanitary Waters

Part II. Water and transgression

3. Aquatic social space : The imaginary topography of transgression

4. Floating across : Water as embodied transgression

Conclusion : New horizons for blue humanities.

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

Description based on print version record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Other Format:

Print version: Kluwick, Ursula, 1977- Haunting ecologies

ISBN:

9780813950990

0813950996