Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire

273 Pages·2018·16.42 MB·English

by  Nathan K. Hensley and Philip Steer (eds.)

HENSLEY
LITERARY STUDIES | ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES
STEER
“Th e editors have organized Ecological Form in a way that makes it into a syllabus:
Th e categories of Method, Form, Scale, and Futures could structure a semester, and
the range of literary forms—the novel, poetry, drama, and nonfi ction prose—and E
earthly objects—indigo, water, coal, electricity—would take students across a c
startling range of Victorian texts and eco-political issues. A brilliant collection
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for researchers as well, the essays in this collection avoid the clichés of the Ecological Form
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‘Anthropocene’ to take a much harder look at what nineteenth-century texts and
their authors were thinking about the Earth and its possible and impossible futures.” g
—Elaine Freedgood, New York University i
c
a
Ecological Form brings together leading voices in nineteenth-century ecocriticism
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to suture the lingering divide between postcolonial and ecocritical approaches.
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Together, these essays show how Victorian thinkers used aesthetic form to engage
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problems of system, interconnection, and dispossession that remain our own. Th e
r
authors reconsider Victorian literary structures in light of environmental catastrophe,
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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, S System and Aesthetics
y
s
the scientifi c treatise, and beyond, Ecological Form demonstrates how nineteenth- te in the Age of Empire
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century thinkers conceptualized the circuits of extraction and violence linking Britain a
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to its global network. Yet the book’s most pressing argument is that this past thought d
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can be a resource for reimagining the present. e
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CONTRIBUTORS: Monique Allewaert, Sukanya Banerjee, Adam Grener, Nathan K. Hensley, t
i
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Deanna K. Kreisel, Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, Benjamin Morgan, Karen Pinkus, Aaron Rosenberg, s
Teresa Shewry, Philip Steer, Jesse Oak Taylor, Lynn Voskuil in Nathan K. Hensley
t
h Philip Steer
NATHAN K. HENSLEY is Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University. e
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g Editors
PHILIP STEER is Senior Lecturer in English at Massey University. e
o Afterword by
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KAREN PINKUS is Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. E
m Karen Pinkus
p
ir
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Fordham University Press | New York
www.fordhampress.com
Cover image: Illustration by Henry Bradbury of Polypodium Robertianum,
in Th omas Moore’s Th e Ferns of Great Britain and Ireland (1857). From the
New York Public Library Digital Collections.
Cover design by Ann Christine Racette
FORDHAM
Ecological Form
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Ecological Form
System and Aesthetics
in the Age of Empire
Nathan K. Hensley
and Philip Steer
Editors
fordham university press
New York 2019
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Copyright © 2019 Fordham University Press
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First edition
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contents
Introduction: Ecological Formalism; or, Love among
the Ruins
nathan k. hensley and philip steer 1
Part I method
1. Drama, Ecology, and the Ground of Empire:
The Play of Indigo
sukanya banerjee 21
2. Mourning Species: In Memoriam in an Age of Extinction
jesse oak taylor 42
3. Signatures of the Carboniferous: The Literary Forms
of Coal
nathan k. hensley and philip steer 63
Part II form
4. Fixed Capital and the Flow: Water Power, Steam Power,
and The Mill on the Floss
elizabeth carolyn miller 85
5. “Form Against Force”: Sustainability and Organicism
in the Work of John Ruskin
deanna k. kreisel 101
6. Mapping the “Invisible Region, Far Away”
in Dombey and Son
adam grener 121
Part III scale
7. How We Might Live: Utopian Ecology in William Morris
and Samuel Butler
benjamin morgan 139
v
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vi Contents
8. From Specimen to System: Botanical Scale
and the Environmental Sublime in Joseph Dalton
Hooker’s Himalayas
lynn voskuil 161
9. “Infi nitesimal Lives”: Thomas Hardy’s Scale Effects
aaron rosenberg 182
Part IV futures
10. Electric Dialectics: Delany’s Atlantic Materialism
monique allewaert 203
11. Satire’s Ecology
teresa shewry 223
Afterword: They Would Have Ended by Burning
Their Own Globe
karen pinkus 241
Acknowledgments 249
List of Contributors 251
Index 253
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Ecological Form
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introduction
Ecological Formalism; or,
Love Among the Ruins
Nathan K. Hensley and Philip Steer
Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of
chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-n avigation, railways,
electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation,
canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the
ground—what earlier century had even a presentiment that
such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?
—KARL MARX AND FRIEDRICH ENGELS, The Communist Manifesto (1848)
In the gloom she did not mind speaking freely.
—THOMAS HARDY, Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891)
For Marx and Engels in 1848, European modernity was a world- demolishing
juggernaut, an engine of vast productivity and vaster catastrophe. To these
most sensitive observers of contemporary life, the new industrial age, pow-
ered by burned coal and the brute labor of newly urbanized masses, was
most recognizable as a terraforming project. Altered chemistry, moved
earth, rerouted rivers: Capitalism was a continent- clearing attack on nature
at world scale, a magic act by which plants, wealth, and even human popula-
tions could be created as though from nothing—“conjured out of the
ground.” In this steam- driven and electrifi ed present, humankind or an
empowered subset of it, enriched by extraction and aided by machine tech-
nology, could enslave the very forces of nature (Naturkräfte), and, like
Xerxes whipping the Hellespont in Herodotus’s famous parable of outland-
ish pride, alter the fl ow of waters on earth. Modernity’s self- infl icted demise
was incipient or imminent to Marx and Engels: They anticipated the bour-
geois world’s terminal crisis as future revolution, augured in stories of
chastened hubris and tragedy inherited from the Greeks.
To twenty-fi rst- century observers, by contrast, the generalized death
drive of western life is palpable, legible, here and now. The earth and its
1
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