Novel Environments: Science, Description, and Victorian Fiction
Jayne Hildebrand, "Novel Environments: Science, Description, and Victorian Fiction"
English | ISBN: 0192888471 | 2023 | 224 pages | EPUB, PDF | 1379 KB + 2 MB
English | ISBN: 0192888471 | 2023 | 224 pages | EPUB, PDF | 1379 KB + 2 MB
The environment concept has shaped humanity's relationship to the natural world and has drawn attention to the effects of human actions on our natural surroundings. But when did we learn that we live in an environment? While scholars have often located the emergence of the environment concept in twentieth-century ecological and political thought, Novel Environments: Science, Description, and Victorian Fiction reconstructs a longer―and a specifically literary―history. It was in the descriptive worldmaking of the Victorian novel that the environment was first transformed from an abstraction into a vivid object of imagination and feeling. Engaging the scientific theories of their contemporaries, Mary Russell Mitford, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Robert Louis Stevenson turned to detailed description―from gardens and landscapes to weather and atmospheres-to model interactions between life and its surroundings. Far from merely furnishing static background, the descriptive apparatus of the Victorian novel imagined the nonhuman environment as dynamically involved with human action, feeling, and development.
In making this argument,
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