Ecological Form

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.—Elaine Freedgood, New York University

...an elegant and deeply considered ensemble of essays, each deftly argued and rigorously researched...—Resurgence Magazine

Ecological Form convenes many exciting voices in a powerful demonstration of approaches now animating nineteenth-century ecocriticism. Yet this luminous collection, scrupulously edited and beautifully produced, is less invested in cordoning off another subfield than in challenging us to steep Victorian scholarship and pedagogy whole cloth with the concepts and concerns of ecological thinking understood in resolutely global terms.—Nineteenth-Century Contexts

This invaluable collection of essays, edited with a marvelous introduction by Philip Steer and Nathan K. Hensley, urges us to reconsider a diverse array of (mostly) nineteenth-century texts in light of the global environmental crisis often known as the “Anthropocene.” …[A]ll of the essays, in different ways, examine their chosen texts not so much for their overt environmental content or thematics...but for the ways in which that sense of unfolding catastrophe posed profound representational challenges and demanded new ways of organizing and representing human experience.—Allen MacDuffie, author of Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination, in Nineteenth-Century Literature

...carefully edited and thoughtfully constructed... Ecological Form would make an excellent primer for those new to the fields of nineteenth-century environmental or postcolonial studies, studies of literature and climate, or Victorian studies more generally. It also proves stimulating reading for those already immersed in these fields and looking to expand a syllabus or engage in areas of recent debate.—Poetics Today