Haunting Ecologies - (Victorian Literature & Culture (Hardcover)) by Ursula Kluwick (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Victorians' views of water and its role in how the social fabric of Victorian Britain was imagined Water matters like few other substances in people's daily lives. In the nineteenth century, it left its traces on politics, urban reform, and societal divisions, as well as on conceptualizations of gender roles. Drawing on the methodology of material ecocriticism, Ursula Kluwick's Haunting Ecologies argues that Victorian Britons were keenly aware of aquatic agency, recognizing water as an active force with the ability to infiltrate bodies and spaces. Kluwick reads works by canonical writers such as Braddon, Dickens, Stoker, and George Eliot alongside sanitary reform discourse, court cases, journalistic articles, satirical cartoons, technical drawings, paintings, and maps. This wide-ranging study sheds new light on Victorian-era anxieties about water contamination as well as on how certain wet landscapes such as sewers, rivers, and marshes became associated with moral corruption and crime. Applying ideas from the field of blue humanities to nineteenth-century texts, Haunting Ecologies argues for the relevance of realism as an Anthropocene form"--

Book Synopsis

Victorians' views of water and its role in how the social fabric of Victorian Britain was imagined

Water matters like few other substances in people's daily lives. In the nineteenth century, it left its traces on politics, urban reform, and societal divisions, as well as on conceptualizations of gender roles. Drawing on the methodology of material ecocriticism, Ursula Kluwick's Haunting Ecologies argues that Victorian Britons were keenly aware of aquatic agency, recognizing water as an active force with the ability to infiltrate bodies and spaces.

Kluwick reads works by canonical writers such as Braddon, Dickens, Stoker, and George Eliot alongside sanitary reform discourse, court cases, journalistic articles, satirical cartoons, technical drawings, paintings, and maps. This wide-ranging study sheds new light on Victorian-era anxieties about water contamination as well as on how certain wet landscapes such as sewers, rivers, and marshes became associated with moral corruption and crime. Applying ideas from the field of blue humanities to nineteenth-century texts, Haunting Ecologies argues for the relevance of realism as an Anthropocene form.

Review Quotes

Working at the confluence of ecocriticism, new materialism, and New Historicism, Haunting Ecologies explores the representation of aquatic matter in Victorian fiction and nonfiction, tracking how such texts articulate water's uncanny ability to transgress and dissolve boundaries--especially boundaries between humans and their environment. Focusing on the inland waters of Victorian Britain--especially, but not exclusively, the Thames and its course through urbanized London--Kluwick emphasizes the agency of water, showcasing its abilities not only to connect physical bodies and watery environs but also to make (and unmake) sociopolitical categories and identities.--Nineteenth-Century Contexts

About the Author

Ursula Kluwick is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Bern, Switzerland, and coeditor of The Beach in Anglophone Literatures and Cultures.