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.
