Environmental Justice in Early Victorian Literature

Environmental Justice in Early Victorian Literature
Author: Adrian Tait
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2023-08-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000923053

This innovative new book combines environmental justice scholarship with a material ecocriticism to explore the way in which early Victorian literature (1837–1860) responded to the growing problem of environmental injustice. As this book emphasises, environmental injustice – simply, the convergence of poverty and pollution – was not an isolated phenomenon, but a structural form of inequality; a product of industrial modernity’s radical reformation of British society, it particularly affected the working classes. As each chapter reveals in detail, this form of environmental inequality (or ‘classism’) drew sharply critical reactions from figures as diverse as Thomas Carlyle, Friedrich Engels, Charles Dickens, and John Ruskin, and from within the Chartist movement, as working-class writers themselves reacted to the hazardous realities of a divided society. But as this book also reveals, these writers recognised that a truly just society respects the needs of the nonhuman and takes account of the material world in all its own aliveness; even if only tentatively, they reached for a more inclusive, emergent form of justice that might address the social and ecological impacts of industrial modernity, an idea which is no less relevant today. This book represents an indispensable resource for scholars and students working in the fields of Victorian literature, environmental justice, and ecocriticism.

Environmental Justice in Early Victorian Literature

Environmental Justice in Early Victorian Literature
Author: Adrian Tate
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2023-08
Genre: Ecocriticism
ISBN: 9780367821609

"This innovative new book combines environmental justice scholarship with a material ecocriticism to explore the way in which early Victorian literature (1837-1860) responded to the growing problem of environmental injustice. As this book emphasises, environmental injustice - simply, the convergence of poverty and pollution - was not an isolated phenomenon, but a structural form of inequality: a product of industrial modernity's radical reformation of British society, it particularly affected the working classes. As each chapter reveals in detail, this form of environmental inequality (or 'classism') drew sharply critical reactions from figures as diverse as Thomas Carlyle, Friedrich Engels, Charles Dickens, and John Ruskin, and from within the Chartist movement, as working-class writers themselves reacted to the hazardous realities of a divided society. But as this book also reveals, these writers recognised that a truly just society respects the needs of the nonhuman and takes account of the material world in all its own aliveness; even if only tentatively, they reached for a more inclusive, emergent form of justice that might address the social and ecological impacts of industrial modernity, an idea which is no less relevant today. This book represents an indispensable resource for scholars and students working in the fields of Victorian literature, environmental justice, and ecocriticism"--

Guerrilla Ecologies

Guerrilla Ecologies
Author: John Maerhofer
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 138
Release: 2024-03-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1040006353

This book intervenes in contemporary debates about climate activism, militancy, and strategy that have been gathering force in radical ecological circles. It responds to some of the urgent questions about utilizing militancy as part of the overall effort to foster an ecosocialist society. Building upon the crucial work of scholars and activists from the 1970s to the present, such as Carolyn Merchant, Ursula Heise, Raj Patel, Joan Martinez Alier, Neil Smith, and Mark Dowie, this book discusses and regenerates key principles of guerrilla ecology. It presents a significant critique of green capital and its impact on the shape of environmental and climate justice movements. From car manufacturers dedicating profits to reforestation, to big oil conglomerates funneling money into universities that are developing techno-fixes which may stave off ecological disaster, green capital has become the mainstay of contemporary cultural, political, and economic reproduction – aiming to fuse profitability and sustainability. The book brings together discussion on key topics in a range of contexts including biopiracy and biocolonialism, indigenous resistance, extractivism, anti-imperialism, ecotage, and eco-militancy. It will attract scholarly readers from diverse spaces in the environmental humanities, environmental and climate justice, radical ecology, and philosophy.

Victorian Ecocriticism

Victorian Ecocriticism
Author: Dewey W. Hall
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2017-10-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 1498551076

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.

Victorian Environmental Nightmares

Victorian Environmental Nightmares
Author: Laurence W. Mazzeno
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2019-05-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3030140423

The twelve essays in Victorian Environmental Nightmares explore various “environmental nightmares” through applied analyses of Victorian texts. Over the course of the nineteenth century, writers of imaginative literature often expressed fears and concerns over environmental degradation (in its wide variety of meanings, including social and moral). In some instances, natural or environmental disasters influenced these responses; in other instances a growing awareness of problems caused by industrial pollution and the growth of cities prompted responses. Seven essays in this volume cover works about Britain and its current and former colonies that examine these nightmare environments at home and abroad. But as the remaining five essays in this collection demonstrate, “environmental nightmares” are not restricted to essays on actual disasters or realistic fiction, since in many cases Victorian writers projected onto imperial landscapes or wholly imagined landscapes in fantastic fiction their anxieties about how humans might change their environments—and how these environments might also change humans.

Environmental Justice in the Anthropocene

Environmental Justice in the Anthropocene
Author: Stacia Ryder
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 358
Release: 2021-06-10
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1000396584

Through various international case studies presented by both practitioners and scholars, Environmental Justice in the Anthropocene explores how an environmental justice approach is necessary for reflections on inequality in the Anthropocene and for forging societal transitions toward a more just and sustainable future. Environmental justice is a central component of sustainability politics during the Anthropocene – the current geological age in which human activity is the dominant influence on climate and the environment. Every aspect of sustainability politics requires a close analysis of equity implications, including problematizing the notion that humans as a collective are equally responsible for ushering in this new epoch. Environmental justice provides us with the tools to critically investigate the drivers and characteristics of this era and the debates over the inequitable outcomes of the Anthropocene for historically marginalized peoples. The contributors to this volume focus on a critical approach to power and issues of environmental injustice across time, space, and context, drawing from twelve national contexts: Austria, Bangladesh, Chile, China, India, Nicaragua, Hungary, Mexico, Brazil, Sweden, Tanzania, and the United States. Beyond highlighting injustices, the volume highlights forward-facing efforts at building just transitions, with a goal of identifying practical steps to connect theory and movement and envision an environmentally and ecologically just future. This interdisciplinary work will be of great interest to students, scholars, and practitioners focused on conservation, environmental politics and governance, environmental and earth sciences, environmental sociology, environment and planning, environmental justice, and global sustainability and governance. It will also be of interest to social and environmental justice advocates and activists.

Bodies and Lives in Victorian England

Bodies and Lives in Victorian England
Author: Pamela K. Stone
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 109
Release: 2020-10-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0429676999

This volume offers an overview of what it was like to be female and to live and die in Victorian England (c. 1837-1901), by situating this experience within the scientific and social contexts of the times. With a temporal focus on women’s life experience, the book moves from childhood and youth, through puberty and adolescence, to pregnancy, birth, and motherhood, into senescence. Drawing on osteological sources, medical discourses, and examples from the literature and cultural history of the period, alongside social and environmental data derived from ethnographic and archival investigations, the authors explore the experience of being female in the Victorian era for women across classes. In synthesizing current research on demographic statistics, maternal morbidity and mortality, and bioarchaeological evidence on patterns of aging and death, they analyze how changing social ideals, cultural and environmental variability, shifting economies, and evolving medical and scientific understanding about the body combined to shape female health and identity in the nineteenth century. Victorian women faced a variety of challenges, including changing attitudes regarding appropriate behavior, social roles, and beauty standards, while grappling with new understandings of the role played by gender and sexuality in shaping women’s lives from youth to old age. The book concludes by considering the relevance of how Victorian narratives of womanhood and the experience of being female have influenced perceptions of female health and cultural constructions of identity today.

Apocalyptic Visions in the Anthropocene and the Rise of Climate Fiction

Apocalyptic Visions in the Anthropocene and the Rise of Climate Fiction
Author: Kübra Baysal
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2021-08-10
Genre: Science
ISBN: 152757363X

With the increasing interest of pop culture and academia towards environmental issues, which has simultaneously given rise to fiction and artworks dealing with interdisciplinary issues, climate change is an undeniable reality of our time. In accordance with the severe environmental degradation and health crises today, including the COVID-19 pandemic, human beings are awakening to this reality through climate fiction (cli-fi), which depicts ways to deal with the anthropogenic transformations on Earth through apocalyptic worlds as displayed in works of literature, media and art. Appealing to a wide range of readers, from NGOs to students, this book fills a gap in the fields of literature, media and art, and sheds light on the inevitable interconnection of humankind with the nonhuman environment through effective descriptions of associable conditions in the works of climate fiction.

Climate Change Fiction and Ecocultural Crisis

Climate Change Fiction and Ecocultural Crisis
Author: Tatiana Konrad
Publisher: University of Nevada Press
Total Pages: 335
Release: 2024-09-24
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 164779160X

Concentrating on a powerful, emerging genre, Tatiana Konrad’s Climate Change Fiction and Ecocultural Crisis provides a survey of popular narratives that further our understanding of climate change in contemporary fiction. Konrad advocates for the expansion and redefinition of the cli-fi genre and argues that industrial fiction from the nineteenth century is the first example of climate change fiction. Tracing the ways through which cli-fi outlines a history of our modern ecocultural crisis, this book demonstrates how the genre employs four major thematic clusters to achieve this narrative: weather, science, religion, and place. Focusing on a diverse range of issues, including fossil fuels, cheap energy, the intricacies of human–more-than-human relationships, and postcolonial geographies, Konrad illustrates how cli-fi transcends mere storytelling. The genre ultimately emerges as an important means to forecast, imagine, and contemplate climatic events. The book invites a broadening of the environmental humanities discourse, asking readers not only to deepen their understanding of the current climate crisis, but also to consider how cli-fi culture can be viewed as an effective method to address climate change.

Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1890s

Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1890s
Author: Dustin Friedman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 676
Release: 2023-08-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1009081632

The 1890s were once seen as marginal within the larger field of Victorian studies, which tended to privilege the realist novel and the authors of the mid-century. In recent decades, the fin de siècle has come to be viewed as one of the most dynamic decades of the Victorian era. Viewed by writers and artists of the period as a moment of opportunity, transition, and urgency, the 1890s are pivotal for understanding the parameters of the field of Victorian studies itself. This volume makes a case for why the decade continues to be an area of perennial fascination, focusing on transnational connections, gender and sexuality, ecological concerns, technological innovations, and other current critical trends. This collection both calls attention to the diverse range of literature and art being produced during this period and foregrounds the relevance of the Victorian era's final years to issues and crises that face us today.