Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination

This book explores how Victorian fiction helped create an environmental consciousness by articulating questions about sustainable energy use.

List of contents

Introduction: limited environments, fictions of escape; Part I. Thermodynamics and its Discontents: 1. The city and the sun; 2. The death of the sun at the dawn of the Anthropocene; Part II. Unsustainable Fictions: 3. Energy systems and narrative systems in Charles Dickens's Bleak House; 4. The renewable energies of Our Mutual Friend; 5. John Ruskin's alternative energy; 6. Personal fantasy, natural limits: Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; 7. Joseph Conrad: energy, entropy, and the fictions of empire; 8. Evolutionary energy and the future: Henry Maudsley and H. G. Wells; Bibliography.

About the author

Allen MacDuffie is Assistant Professor in the English Department at the University of Texas, Austin.

Summary

The Victorians first articulated key questions about sustainability and global eco-catastrophe that are now staples of our cultural discourse. Allen MacDuffie explores the way in which the imaginative literature of the nineteenth century sought to address these emerging ecological concerns and helped in the creation of society's environmental consciousness.

Product details

• Authors: Allen MacDuffie, Allen (University of Texas Macduffie
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press ELT
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 29.05.2014
• EAN: 9781107064379
• ISBN: 978-1-107-06437-9
• No. of pages: 324
• Series: Cambridge Studies in Nineteent
• Subjects: Fiction > Poetry, drama; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > English linguistics / literary studies