Fordham University Press Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire

Ecological Form brings together leading voices in nineteenth-century ecocriticism to suture the lingering divide between postcolonial and ecocritical approaches. Together, these essays show how Victorian thinkers used aesthetic form to engage problems of system, interconnection, and dispossession that remain our own. The authors reconsider Victorian literary structures in light of environmental catastrophe; coordinate “natural” questions with sociopolitical ones; and underscore the category of form as a means for generating environmental―and therefore political―knowledge. Moving from the elegy and the industrial novel to the utopian romance, the scientific treatise, and beyond, Ecological Form demonstrates how nineteenth-century thinkers conceptualized the circuits of extraction and violence linking Britain to its global network. Yet the book’s most pressing argument is that this past thought can be a resource for reimagining the present. Review The editors have organized Ecological Form in a way that makes it into a syllabus: the categories of Method, Form, Scale, and Futures could structure a semester, and the range of literary forms―the novel, poetry, drama, and non-fiction prose--and earthly objects―indigo, water, coal, electricity--would take students across a startling range of Victorian texts and eco-political issues. A brilliant collection for researchers as well, the essays in this collection avoid the clichés of the “Anthropocene” to take a much harder look at what nineteenth-century texts and their authors were thinking about the earth and its possible and impossible futures. Author: Elaine Freedgood, New York University From the Author Karen Pinkus (Afterword By) Karen Pinkus is Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. She is the author of Fuel: A Speculative Dictionary (2016), Alchemical Mercury: A Theory of Ambivalence (2009), The Montesi Scandal: The Death of Wilma Montesi and the Birth of the Paparazzi in Fellini’s Rome (2003), Picturing Silence: Emblem, Language, Counter- Reformation Materiality (1996), and Bodily Regimes: Italian Advertising Under Fascism (1995). Nathan K. Hensley (Edited By) Nathan K. Hensley is Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University. He is the author of Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty (2016). Philip Steer (Edited By) Philip Steer is Senior Lecturer in English at Massey University. His current book project is “Borders of Britishness: The Novel and Political Economy in the Victorian Settler Empire.” About the Author Nathan K. Hensley is Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University. He is the author of Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty (2016). Philip Steer is Senior Lecturer in English at Massey University. His current book project is “Borders of Britishness: The Novel and Political Economy in the Victorian Settler Empire.” Karen Pinkus is Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. She is the author of Fuel: A Speculative Dictionary (2016), Alchemical Mercury: A Theory of Ambivalence (2009), The Montesi Scandal: The Death of Wilma Montesi and the Birth of the Paparazzi in Fellini’s Rome (2003), Picturing Silence: Emblem, Language, Counter- Reformation Materiality (1996), and Bodily Regimes: Italian Advertising Under Fascism (1995). Nathan K. Hensley is Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University. He is the author of Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty (2016). Philip Steer is Senior Lecturer in English at Massey University. His current book project is “Borders of Britishness: The Novel and Political Economy in the Victorian Settler Empire.”