Table Of ContentVictorian
Environmental
Nightmares
Edited by
Laurence W. Mazzeno · Ronald D. Morrison
Victorian Environmental Nightmares
Laurence W. Mazzeno ·
Ronald D. Morrison
Editors
Victorian
Environmental
Nightmares
Editors
Laurence W. Mazzeno Ronald D. Morrison
Alvernia University Department of English
Reading, PA, USA Morehead State University
Morehead, KY, USA
ISBN 978-3-030-14041-0 ISBN 978-3-030-14042-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14042-7
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019932941
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Cover illustration: “The Silent Highway”-man (illustration of the polluted Thames River
published in Punch July 10, 1858 during the Great Stink) Science History Images/Alamy
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A
cknowledgements
Both editors wish to formally commend our contributors for their
exceptional response to our solicitation for articles, for their cheerful
responses to our queries, and for their promptness in meeting deadlines.
Laurence W. Mazzeno wishes to acknowledge the assistance he
received from the staff of the Frank A. Franco Library at Alvernia
University, and the staff of the Jefferson County Public Library in
Colorado.
Ronald D. Morrison extends his gratitude to the following individuals
at Morehead State University for negotiating a reduced teaching load to
support this project: Tom Williams, former Associate Dean of the School
of English, Communication, Media, and Languages; Layne Neeper,
Associate Dean of the School of English, Communication, Media,
and Languages; and John Ernst, Dean of the Caudill College of Arts,
Humanities, and Social Sciences.
v
c
ontents
1 Introduction: Representing Victorian Environmental
Nightmares 1
Laurence W. Mazzeno and Ronald D. Morrison
Part I At Home
2 The Assumption of the Dragon: Ruskin’s Mythic Vision 25
Sara Atwood
3 Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Failed Pastoral and the
Environments of the Poor 45
Mary Sanders Pollock
4 Pip’s Nightmare and Orlick’s Dream 61
Allen MacDuffie
Part II Abroad
5 Frances Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans
and the EcoGothic 81
Ronald D. Morrison
vii
viii CoNTENTS
6 James Thomson’s Deserts 101
John Miller
7 “Tragic ring-barked forests” and the “Wicked Wood”:
Haunting Environmental Anxiety in Late
Nineteenth-Century Australian Literature 121
Susan K. Martin
8 “Rivers Change Like Nations”: Reading
Eco-Apocalypse in The Waters of Edera 145
Alicia Carroll
Part III Imagined Landscapes
9 Disaster and Deserts: Children’s Natural History
as Nightmare and Dream 167
Naomi Wood
10 Imperial Ecologies and Extinction in H. G. Wells’s
Island Stories 185
Jade Munslow ong
11 Human Intervention and More-Than-Human
Humanity in H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau 207
Shun Yin Kiang
12 Nowhere to Go: Caught Between Nature and Culture
in Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales 227
Susan M. Bernardo
13 Ecocrisis and Slow Violence: Anthropocene Readings
of Late-Victorian Disaster Narratives 243
Mark Frost
Index 263
n c
otes on ontributors
Sara Atwood’s work has appeared in The Ruskin Review and Bulletin,
Nineteenth-Century Prose, The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, and
Carlyle Studies Annual. Her book Ruskin’s Educational Ideals was pub-
lished by Ashgate in 2011. She is a contributor to the Yale University
Press edition of Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic
in History (2013), Teaching Victorian Literature in the Twenty-First
Century (Palgrave, 2017), and John Ruskin and Nineteenth-Century
Education (Anthem Press, 2018). She has lectured widely on Ruskin,
focusing particularly on education, the environment, and language. She
is a Companion of the Guild of St. George and editor of its annual jour-
nal, The Companion. Dr. Atwood teaches English literature at Portland
State University and writing at Portland Community College.
Susan M. Bernardo teaches literary theory, British literature, fairy tales,
and science fiction at Wagner College, where she is Professor of English.
At conferences, she has presented on Victorian literature (most recently
on Edith Nesbit’s short fiction and on oscar Wilde’s fairy tales), science
fiction, and film. She has co-authored (with Graham Murphy) a book on
Ursula Le Guin’s works and contributed chapters on Butler’s Parable
of the Sower and Griffith’s Slow River, Eliot’s Romola, Mary Shelley’s
Mathilda, and C. J. Cherryh’s Cyteen to various edited volumes. She
has edited a book called Environments in Science Fiction: Essays on
Alternative Spaces (2014), to which she contributed a chapter on Philip
K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? She has also contributed
ix
x NoTES oN CoNTRIBUToRS
a chapter to Time Travel Television (editors Sherry Ginn and Gillian
Leitch, 2015) and to Tim Burton: Essays on the Films (edited by Johnson
Cheu, 2016). Her next book will focus on Star Trek: Voyager.
Alicia Carroll is Associate Professor of English at Auburn University,
Auburn, Alabama. She is the author of Dark Smiles: Race and Desire
in the Works of George Eliot (2003). Her recent work on Victorians and
the environment has appeared in Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism,
Romantic Ecocriticism: Origins and Legacies, and Victorian Review. She
has also published extensively on George Eliot.
Mark Frost is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of
Portsmouth, Portsmouth, UK. He is the author of The Lost Companions
and John Ruskin’s Guild of St. George: A Revisionary History (2014)
and articles on Ruskin in Victorian Literature and Culture (2011),
Nineteenth-Century Prose (2011), Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism
(2011), Journal of Commonwealth Literature (2010), The Eighth Lamp:
Ruskin Studies Today (2009), and Victorian Writers and the Environment
(2017). He is also the editor of the new edition of Richard Jefferies’s
After London (Edinburgh UP, 2017).
Shun Yin Kiang is an Assistant Professor of English at the University
of Central oklahoma. His research and teaching interests span Victorian
and Edwardian literature, twentieth- and twenty-first-century British lit-
erature, and contemporary Anglophone fiction, with emphases on the
novel, postcolonial thought, and ecocriticism. His articles on friendship
in Edwardian and twentieth-century English fiction appeared in ARIEL
and Creatural Fictions in 2016. He is currently at work on two pro-
jects: an essay on magical thinking and assemblages as history in Shani
Mootoo’s fiction, and guest-editing a special issue of The Global South on
the possibilities of and problems with contextualizing the Anglophone
novel.
Allen MacDuffie Associate Professor of English at the University of
Texas at Austin, is the author of Victorian Literature, Energy, and the
Ecological Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 2014), winner of
the Sonya Rudikoff Award for the best first scholarly book in the field
of Victorian Studies. His essays on Victorian fiction and poetry have
appeared in Representations, ELH, PMLA, and Philological Quarterly,
and his most recent work, on the television series Breaking Bad and con-
temporary serial narrative, is forthcoming from Cultural Critique.
NoTES oN CoNTRIBUToRS xi
Susan K. Martin is Professor in English and Associate Pro Vice-Chancellor
(Research) in the College of Arts, Social Sciences and Commerce, La Trobe
University, Australia. Her teaching is in Australian studies and Victorian
culture. She publishes on nineteenth- to twenty-first-century Anglophone
literature and culture, including cultures of reading, garden history, and
literature and the environment, in journals including English Studies and
Studies in The History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes. Her books
include Reading the Garden with Katie Holmes and Kylie Mirmohamadi
(2008), Women and Empire (Australia) (2009), Sensational Melbourne
(2011), and Colonial Dickens (2012) with Kylie Mirmohamadi. She is cur-
rently working with an interdisciplinary team on a project on national iden-
tity and the teaching of literature in schools in the digital age.
Laurence W. Mazzeno president emeritus of Alvernia University,
is the author or editor of twenty books on British and American lit-
erary figures, including two collections of essays co-edited with
Ronald D. Morrison, Victorian Writers and the Environment: Ecocritical
Perspectives and Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture: Contexts
for Criticism. He has published articles in refereed journals, literary jour-
nalism, and reference articles, reviews, and selected bibliographies. He
served as academic editor for two editions of Masterplots (14 volumes)
and has been on the editorial staff of Nineteenth-Century Prose and its
predecessor journals since 1980.
John Miller is a Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the
University of Sheffield. His books include Empire and the Animal Body
(Anthem, 2012) and (with Louise Miller) Walrus (Reaktion, 2014). He
is co-editor of Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, co-director
of ShARC (Sheffield Animal Studies Research Centre) and Deputy Chair
of ASLE-UKI (Association for Study of Literature and the Environment,
UK & Ireland). His current book project is a literary history of fur.
Ronald D. Morrison is Professor of English at Morehead State University.
He is co-editor, with Laurence W. Mazzeno, of Victorian Writers and the
Environment: Ecocritical Perspectives (Routledge, 2016) and Animals in
Victorian Literature and Culture: Contexts for Criticism (Palgrave, 2017).
He has published essays on a range of nineteenth-century authors, includ-
ing Hardy, Dickens, Christina Rossetti, and Wordsworth, among others.
He is currently writing a volume on Hardy’s novels for MacFarland’s new
companion series on nineteenth-century authors.
