Victorian Ecocriticism

Reviews / Votes

This collection of nine essays by a range of international scholars (supplemented with Hall's helpful introduction) represents a substantial contribution to the growing body of ecocriticism focused on Victorian literature. Hall (California State Polytechnic, Pomona) takes up where he left off in his edited collection Romantic Ecocriticism: Origins and Legacies (CH, Dec'16, 54-1607), beginning with an essay on Wordsworth and the preservation of the English Lake District and going on to essays on Charlotte Bronte, Dickens, Hardy, and Trollope, among others. The volume is narrower in focus than Victorian Writers and the Environment, ed. by Laurence Mazzeno and Ronald Morrison (2017), but it complements that volume by focusing squarely on the significance of place and environmental justice in Victorian literature broadly defined, with about half the essays examining environmental conditions in Australia, Newfoundland, and the US. Though informed by recent ecocritical theory, the essays are accessible to serious readers. Highlights include Marlee Fuhrmann's provocative essay "Seeing Soils," which considers Thoreau and Frank Norris; Akemi Yoshida's eco-theological reading of Charles Kingsley's The Water-Babies; and Michelle Deininger and Natalie Rose Cox's eco-gothic reading of Elizabeth Gaskell's short fiction. Summing Up: Recommended. Undergraduates through faculty. * Choice Reviews * Breaking new ground with innovative ecocritical approaches to key Victorian-period texts from across the British Empire, Dewey Hall's new collection of ten sharp, theoretically engaged essays by early and established scholars from the U.S., UK, and Japan shows how ecological theories of place and belonging produce and are produced by questions of environmental justice--a timely and important contribution to our historical understanding of the role that literature played in the emergence of these two crucial modern environmental concepts. -- Drew Hubbell, Susquehanna University Victorian Ecocriticism: The Politics of Place and Early Environmental Justice offers a fascinating variety of perspectives upon the representation of place in Victorian literature. This engaging and eclectic collection of essays is distinctive in its focus upon themes of environmental justice that exemplify the social engagement of Victorian authors in their depiction of natural landscapes and human communities throughout the English-speaking world: from the British Isles to Australia, Newfoundland, and America. Each of these essays offers a fresh and original approach to understanding Victorian literature from an ecocritical point of view. -- James McKusick, University of Missouri-Kansas City The range of locations, authors, and contexts covered by this volume underlines the ways in which Victorian economic expansion enabled the proliferation of national and international networks of environmental violence with wide-ranging social and ecological impacts...[which make] this a valuable addition to an expanding field of Victorian ecocriticm. -- Mark Frost, University of Portsmouth * Nineteenth-Century Contexts *