Overview
- Makes important interventions in both Victorian studies and literature and the environment
- Examines a diverse selection of print culture, including poetry, novels, maps, travel writing and scientific discovery to show how the Victorians interacted with different environments
- Aims to respond to questions about how the Victorians dealt with different environmental changes and considers tensions between nature and culture
Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture (PNWC)
Access this book
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Other ways to access
Table of contents (13 chapters)
-
Mapping
-
Food, Hunger, and Contamination
Keywords
About this book
This collection will draw attention to new ideas in both Victorian studies and in the emerging area of literature and the environment. Adopting a broad interpretation of the term ‘environment’ the work aims to draw together new approaches to Victorian texts and cultures that conceptualise and are influenced by environments ranging from rural to urban, British to Antipodean, and from the terrestrial to the aquatic.With the pressures of industrialism and the clustering of workers in urban centres, the Victorians were acutely aware that their environment was changing. Torn between nostalgia for a countryside that was in jeopardy and exhilaration at the rapidity with which their surroundings altered, the literature and culture produced by the Victorians reflects a world undergoing radical change. Colonization and assisted emigration schemes expanded the scope of the environment still further, pushing the boundaries of the ‘home’ on an unprecedented scale and introducing strange new worlds. These untamed physical environments enabled new freedoms, but also posed challenges that invited attempts to control, taxonomize and harness the natural world. Victorian Environments draws together leading and emerging international scholars for an examination of how various kinds of environments were constructed, redefined, and transformed, in British and colonial texts and cultures, with particular attention to the relationship between Australia and Britain.
Reviews
Editors and Affiliations
About the editors
Grace Moore is a Senior Research Fellow at the Australian Research Council’s Centre for Excellence in the History of Emotions at the University of Melbourne, Australia, where she is also a Senior Lecturer in Victorian studies. Her monograph, Dickens and Empire was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Award for Literary Scholarship in 2006. She is the author of The Victorian Novel in Context (2012), and several edited collections.
Michelle J. Smith is a Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies at Monash University, Australia. Her monograph Empire in British Girls’ Literature and Culture: Imperial Girls, 1880–1915 (Palgrave, 2011) won the European Society for the Study of English’s Book Award for Junior Scholars in 2012. With Kristine Moruzi and Clare Bradford, she is the author of From Colonial to Modern: Transnational Girlhood in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Children’s Literature (1840-1940) (2018). She is currently working on astudy of female beauty in Victorian literature and periodicals.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Victorian Environments
Book Subtitle: Acclimatizing to Change in British Domestic and Colonial Culture
Editors: Grace Moore, Michelle J. Smith
Series Title: Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57337-7
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan London
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-137-57336-0Published: 16 March 2018
eBook ISBN: 978-1-137-57337-7Published: 07 March 2018
Series ISSN: 2634-6494
Series E-ISSN: 2634-6508
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XV, 317
Number of Illustrations: 9 b/w illustrations
Topics: British and Irish Literature, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Postcolonial/World Literature, Cultural History