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Victorian Ecocriticism: The Politics of Place and Early
Environmental Justice aims to take up the challenge that Lawrence
Buell lays out in The Future of Environmental Criticism:
Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (2005). Buell
decries: "For in order to bring 'environmental justice into
ecocriticism,' a few more articles or conference sessions won't
suffice. There must be 'a fundamental rethinking and reworking of
the field as a whole'" (Buell 113). While discussions about nature
conservation and preservation have been important within the
context of ecocriticism, Buell asserts that the holy grail for the
field is actually how literary critics engage in discourse about
questions of place as space humanized for the purpose of tracing,
disclosing, and advancing the important issue of environmental
justice-as it applies to human beings, animals, and plants. The
"fundamental reworking" or shift in the field of Victorian Studies
really has to do with the dearth of ecocritical publishing about
seminal authors and literary texts. Victorian Ecocriticism aims to
participate in filling that vacuum, lack, or lacuna by featuring
current research about the Victorian era from an ecocritical
perspective. Victorian Ecocriticism hopes to identify, establish,
and organize its content based on six themes: Ecocrisis,
Ecofeminism, Ecogothicism, Ecohistoricism, Ecotheology, and
Ecological Interdependence. The edited collection, thus, has two
aims. First, selected places among others featured in the edition
will provide environmental contexts, often with political
implications: American rural landscape (e.g., Walden Pond),
Australian mines, British hill-country, metropolis, mill towns, the
sea, and the woods. Second, the edition includes discussions about
various instances of early environmental justice evident during the
mid-nineteenth century such as, but not limited to: anti-railway
campaigns, biological egalitarianism, labor disputes due to adverse
working conditions, patterns of displacement, reactions to
Victorian scientism, resistance to enclosure, and working class
education. Victorian Ecocriticism is an interdisciplinary edition.
It focuses on Victorian literature as the foundational discipline
linked to various disciplines such as ecology, evolutionary
biology, natural history, and soil science. The topics are
wide-ranging, significant, and contemporary discussing the politics
of place as well as early environmental justice.
This interdisciplinary study examines the role interpersonal and
place attachment bonds play in crafting a national identity in
American literature. Although there have been numerous ecocritical
studies of and psychoanalytic approaches to American literature,
this study seeks to integrate the language of empirical science and
the physical realities of place, while also investigating non-human
agency and that which exists beyond the material realm. Murphy
considers how writers in the early American Republic constructed
modernity by restructuring representations of interpersonal and
place attachments, which are subsequently reimagined, reconfigured,
and sometimes even rejected by writers in the long nineteenth
century. Within each narrative American perceptions of otherness
are pathologized as a result of insecure human-to-human and
human-to-place attachments, resulting in a restructuring of
antiquated notions of difference. Throughout, Murphy argues that in
order to understand fully the contextually varied framework of
human bonding, it is important to emphasize America's "attachment"
to various constructions of otherness. Historically, people of
color, women, ethnic groups, and lower class citizens have been
relegated-socially, politically, and culturally-to a place of
subordination. Refugees escaping the French and Haitian Revolutions
to American cities encouraged writers to transform social,
cultural, and political attachments in ways that the American
Revolution did not. The United States has always been part of an
extended global network that provides fertile ground from which to
imagine a future American identity; this book thus gestures toward
future readers, educators, and scholars who seek to explore new
fields and new approaches to understand the underlying human
motivations that continually inspire the American imagination.
Victorian Ecocriticism: The Politics of Place and Early
Environmental Justice aims to take up the challenge that Lawrence
Buell lays out in The Future of Environmental Criticism:
Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (2005). Buell
decries: "For in order to bring 'environmental justice into
ecocriticism,' a few more articles or conference sessions won't
suffice. There must be 'a fundamental rethinking and reworking of
the field as a whole'" (Buell 113). While discussions about nature
conservation and preservation have been important within the
context of ecocriticism, Buell asserts that the holy grail for the
field is actually how literary critics engage in discourse about
questions of place as space humanized for the purpose of tracing,
disclosing, and advancing the important issue of environmental
justice-as it applies to human beings, animals, and plants. The
"fundamental reworking" or shift in the field of Victorian Studies
really has to do with the dearth of ecocritical publishing about
seminal authors and literary texts. Victorian Ecocriticism aims to
participate in filling that vacuum, lack, or lacuna by featuring
current research about the Victorian era from an ecocritical
perspective. Victorian Ecocriticism hopes to identify, establish,
and organize its content based on six themes: Ecocrisis,
Ecofeminism, Ecogothicism, Ecohistoricism, Ecotheology, and
Ecological Interdependence. The edited collection, thus, has two
aims. First, selected places among others featured in the edition
will provide environmental contexts, often with political
implications: American rural landscape (e.g., Walden Pond),
Australian mines, British hill-country, metropolis, mill towns, the
sea, and the woods. Second, the edition includes discussions about
various instances of early environmental justice evident during the
mid-nineteenth century such as, but not limited to: anti-railway
campaigns, biological egalitarianism, labor disputes due to adverse
working conditions, patterns of displacement, reactions to
Victorian scientism, resistance to enclosure, and working class
education. Victorian Ecocriticism is an interdisciplinary edition.
It focuses on Victorian literature as the foundational discipline
linked to various disciplines such as ecology, evolutionary
biology, natural history, and soil science. The topics are
wide-ranging, significant, and contemporary discussing the politics
of place as well as early environmental justice.
Monstrous Kinships: Realism and Attachment Theory in the Novels of
Mary Shelley, Herman Melville, Thomas Hardy, Stephen Crane,
Theodore Dreiser, and Vladimir Nabokov investigates the connection
between realist fiction of the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries and the psychoanalytic approach of John Bowlby's
Attachment Theory. Attachment Theory arises from the guiding
principles of realism and the veratist's devotion to long-term,
direct observation of subject matter. Additionally, because
Attachment Theory originated in the field of child psychoanalysis,
this book highlights the detrimental effects of parental obsession
and abandonment, industrialism, poverty, alcoholism, religious
addiction, and physical, emotional, and sexual abuse on child
characters. The subject of Monstrous Kinships is timely, as
literary critics and theorists as well as creative writers continue
to expand their range of inquiry to include the child as primary
subject in various treatments of post-colonial and transnational
culture.
This interdisciplinary study examines the role interpersonal and
place attachment bonds play in crafting a national identity in
American literature. Although there have been numerous ecocritical
studies of and psychoanalytic approaches to American literature,
this study seeks to integrate the language of empirical science and
the physical realities of place, while also investigating non-human
agency and that which exists beyond the material realm. Murphy
considers how writers in the early American Republic constructed
modernity by restructuring representations of interpersonal and
place attachments, which are subsequently reimagined, reconfigured,
and sometimes even rejected by writers in the long nineteenth
century. Within each narrative American perceptions of otherness
are pathologized as a result of insecure human-to-human and
human-to-place attachments, resulting in a restructuring of
antiquated notions of difference. Throughout, Murphy argues that in
order to understand fully the contextually varied framework of
human bonding, it is important to emphasize America’s
"attachment" to various constructions of otherness. Historically,
people of color, women, ethnic groups, and lower class citizens
have been relegated—socially, politically, and culturally—to a
place of subordination. Refugees escaping the French and Haitian
Revolutions to American cities encouraged writers to transform
social, cultural, and political attachments in ways that the
American Revolution did not. The United States has always been part
of an extended global network that provides fertile ground from
which to imagine a future American identity; this book thus
gestures toward future readers, educators, and scholars who seek to
explore new fields and new approaches to understand the underlying
human motivations that continually inspire the American
imagination.
At his death, Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) was universally
acknowledged in America and England as the Great Romancer. Novels
such as ""The Scarlet Letter"" and ""The House of the Seven
Gables"" and stories published in such collections as ""Twice-Told
Tales"" continue to capture the minds and imaginations of readers
and critics to this day. Harder to capture, however, were the
character and personality of the man himself. So few of the essays
that appeared in the two years after his death offered new insights
into his life, art, and reputation that Hawthorne seemed fated to
premature obscurity or, at least, permanent misrepresentation. This
first collection of personal reminiscences by those who knew
Hawthorne intimately or knew about him through reliable secondary
sources rescues him from these confusions and provides the real
human history behind the successful writer. Remembrances from
Elizabeth Peabody, Sophia Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph
Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott, Rebecca Harding Davis, and twenty
others printed in ""Hawthorne in His Own Time"" follow him from his
childhood in Salem, through his years of initial literary
obscurity, his days in the Boston and Salem Custom Houses, his
service as U.S. Consul to Liverpool and Manchester, and his life in
the Anglo-American communities at Rome and Florence, to his late
years as the Great Romancer. In their enlightening introduction,
editors Ronald Bosco and Jillmarie Murphy assess the postmortem
building of Hawthorne's reputation as well as his relationship to
the prominent Transcendentalists, spiritualists, Swedenborgians,
and other personalities of his time. By clarifying the sentimental
associations between Hawthorne's writings and his actual
personality and moving away from the critical review to the
personal narrative, these artful and perceptive reminiscences tell
the private and public story of a remarkable life.
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