Through new ecocritical readings of 18th and 19th century English genre fictions, this book explores the intersection between English national identity and the environment in 16 key novels to highlight the importance of centering the 'green' imagination in modern English literature studies
In this moment of growing anxiety about the environment and the fate of humanity, literature plays, and has always played, an important part in articulating concerns and dynamic new ways of thinking. Locating the first significant moment in the development of this anxiety in the genre fiction of the late 19th and early 20th century, cultural historian Gerry Smyth explores how popular novelists of the period brought together debates surrounding the state of English national identity with their concerns for the impact of the agricultural and industrial revolution on the English environment. Through 16 case studies of fantasy, science fiction, crime and children's stories, this book breaks down novels alongside their cultural and historical contexts in order to show how the relationship between (English) identity and England became a central focus of the popular literary imagination.
Offering an overlooked pre-history that has contributed to the emergence of ecocriticism as we know it today, this book develops new reading methods and discussions surrounding much-loved British texts and ultimately reveals an unlikely but important alternative literary genealogy for modern English literature and environmental cultures. Featuring discussions of classic texts from The Heart of Darkness, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Island of Dr Moreau to Lolly Willows, The Hobbit, The Wind in the Willows and Brave New World, Smyth pulls out such themes as agriculture, industry, technology, empire, class, gender struggles, animal rights, artificial intelligence, the devastation of nature and evolution among many others. A demonstration of the enduring importance of new ways of thinking in the face of the climate crisis, this accessible but creative book shows how English novels were shaped by and negotiated environmental changes felt deeply even a hundred years ago.
Arvustused
From The Wind in the Willows to The Hobbit to Orwell Ive been waiting for this book for such a long time. The period from 1890 to 1940 is a treasure trove of environmentally-aware texts, but hardly ever have they been given the attention they deserve. Gerry Smyths book is its own kind of treasure trove and scholarship will be drawing on its arguments for years to come. * Timothy Morton, author of Hell and Hyperobjects * In this book, Smyth offers a compelling new genealogy of genre fiction, finding that its fantasies and mythologies carry as ballast the green heart of England, where nature is fragile but still serves as a symbolic redoubt. Cannily, systematically, the author finds ecological thinking where we might least expect it: not in the tradition of Romantic paean or industrial lament, but in the thickets of the new genre fictions that flourished after 1890. There we see Englands once and future Eden and the secret plots of violated nature clustered in fantasies of otherworldly space, of childhood nostalgia, of homegrown exotica, of dreamscapes and superstates. Out of the collision between a spoiled and violated nature in the late industrial age and a flourishing new genre system in English fiction, Smyth constructs a marvellous new genealogy of coded even magical environmental thinking. * Jed Esty, University of Pennsylvania, USA *
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Through new ecocritical readings of 18th and 19th century English genre fictions, this book explores the intersection between English national identity and the environment in 16 key novels to highlight the importance of centering the green imagination in modern English literature studies
Acknowledgements
Timeline
Introduction
Chapter 1: News from Nowhere (1890) by William Morris
Chapter 2: The Island of Dr Moreau (1896) by H.G. Wells
Chapter 3: Heart of Darkness (1901) by Joseph Conrad
Chapter 4: The Hill of Dreams (1907) by Arthur Machin
Chapter 5: The Wind in the Willows (1908) by Kenneth Grahame
Chapter 6: The Lost World (1912) by Arthur Conan Doyle
Chapter 7: The Return of the Soldier (1918) by Rebecca West
Chapter 8: Lolly Willowes (1926) by Sylvia Townsend Warner
Chapter 9: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) by Agatha Christie
Chapter 10: Swallows and Amazons (1930) by Arthur Ransome
Chapter 11: Cold Comfort Farm (1932) by Stella Gibbons
Chapter 12: Brave New World (1932) by Aldous Huxley
Chapter 13: The Hobbit (1937) by J.R.R. Tolkien
Chapter 14: Coming Up for Air (1939) by George Orwell
Conclusion: Optimism with a Broken Heart
Notes
References
Index
Gerry Smyth is Professor of Irish Cultural History at Liverpool John Moores University, UK. His research interests cover Irish literary history, James Joyce, modernism, music and literature, posthumanism and ecocriticism and he has published extensively in these areas including such books as Space and the Irish Cultural Imagination (2001), Listening to the Novel: Music in Contemporary British Fiction (2008), and Joyces Noyces: Music and Sound in the Life and Literature of James Joyce (2021).
