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The Cambridge companion to Victorian literature and the environment / edited by Dennis Denisoff.

Cambridge Companions Online: Full Collection Available online

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Format:
Book
Contributor:
Denisoff, Dennis, 1961- editor.
Series:
Cambridge companions to literature.
Cambridge companions to literature
Language:
English
Subjects (All):
English literature--19th century--History and criticism.
English literature.
Ecology in literature.
Environmental literature--Great Britain--History and criticism.
Environmental literature.
Physical Description:
1 online resource (xv, 308 pages) : illustrations ; digital, PDF file(s).
Place of Publication:
Cambridge ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2026.
Summary:
"Today's environmental decimation and climate crises have arisen from our drive for individual material prosperity. We even appreciate nature primarily for its fulfilment of our interests, whether economic productivity, aesthetic pleasure, or personal well-being. And yet, we still ask how we have reached this dire ecological condition and what it is that has kept us from acting effectively to maintain a thriving and diverse biosphere. This collection of essays by major scholars from around the world analyzes how the industrial, imperialist Victorian era gave rise to today's unwillingness to move beyond our acquisitive drive. But it also explores the Victorians' initiation of the modern environmentalist movement, formulation of the first legislation defending rights of nonhuman animals, and invention of literary forms for contesting environmental degradation. In this most unlikely of eras, the volume uncovers both valuable insights into the limitations of our own environmentalism and innovative suggestions for overcoming them."-- Provided by publisher.
Contents:
Novel geologies : Victorian fiction in catastrophic times / Jesse Oak Taylor
Ecogothic : Dislocations of scale / Roger Luckhurst
Entropy, exhaustion, and degeneration in science fiction and decadence / Benjamin Morgan
Blue ecologies / Cannon Schmitt
Aesthetic form and global systems / Nathan K. Hensley
Agricultural ecologies / Grace Moore
Empire, environment, and botanical art in British India / Lindsay Wells
The agricultural roots of realism : Lal Behari Day's Govinda Samanta / Sukanya Banerjee
British values, indigenous knowledge, and settler colonial environments / Philip Steer
Floral poetics / Catherine Maxwell
Vegetal ontology in Emily Dickinson's poetic herbarium / Michael Marder
Queer ecology and the animal in Walter Pater and William Sharp / Dennis Denisoff
Plant agency / Elizabeth Chang
"A little in the mining way" : Victorian literatures of extraction / Elizabeth Carolyn Miller
The Victorian Capitalocene : Olive Schreiner on the frontier / Ella Mershon
The art of extinction : Naturalizing colonization and Walter Buller's A History of the Birds of New Zealand*/ Wendy Parkins
Land use : The farm, the common and the wild / Carolyn Lesjak
Pollution / Allen MacDuffie
Art and environment / Kate Flint
Climate and empire / Adeline Johns-Putra
The uncomfortable commons in Lewis Carroll and William Morris / Barbara Leckie
Form and activism / Caroline Levine.
Notes:
Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 27 Apr 2026).
ISBN:
1-009-41283-3
1-009-41286-8
9781009412865 (electronic book)

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