Posthuman Ecosystems in Nineteenth-Century British Literature

Beyond the Tangled Bank: Posthuman Ecosystems in Nineteenth-Century British Literature Item Type text; Electronic Dissertation Authors Lyons, Emily Renee Publisher The University of Arizona. Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. Download date 24/09/2021 21:24:39 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/627738 BEYOND THE TANGLED BANK: POSTHUMAN ECOSYSTEMS IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH LITERATURE by Emily R. Lyons __________________________ Copyright © Emily R. Lyons 2018 A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY In the Graduate College THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA 2018 3 STATEMENT BY AUTHOR This dissertation has been submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library. Brief quotations from this dissertation are allowable without special permission, provided that an accurate acknowledgement of the source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the head of the major department or the Dean of the Graduate College when in his or her judgment the proposed use of the material is in the interests of scholarship. In all other instances, however, permission must be obtained from the author. SIGNED: Emily R. Lyons 4 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First and foremost I must thank the members of my dissertation committee, Suresh Raval, Scott Selisker, Allison Dushane, and Paul Hurh, for their unwavering support throughout this long journey. Allison especially has been a guide and a friend through it all. Along the way I was also fortunate to receive mentorship from Lynda Zwinger, and from Gerald Monsman, who deserves credit for planting the seeds of my first publication. Outside of the English Department, I owe thanks to Eva Hayward for introducing me to new ideas and pushing me intellectually. Thanks are due also to the members of the Writing Program Fellowship Committee and the Patrick Dissertation Fellowship Committee; I am honored to have been the recipient of these department awards, which provided financial support when it was much needed. I am also indebted to Marcia Simon for her tireless commitment to guiding graduate students through the program. None of this would have been possible were it not for the amazing women who were my mentors, colleagues, and role models during my time at Northern Arizona University. Among them are Donelle Ruwe, Irene Matthews, Sanjam Ahluwalia, Frances Riemer, Doreen Martinez, and especially Nancy Paxton, who fostered my love of Victorian literature and taught me to read it like a feminist. I was extremely fortunate to have entered the program with the most supportive cohort one could ask for. I thank Safari Ross, Christine Walsh, Michelle Denham, Brianna Winslow, Sammy O’Connor, Doug Wykstra, and Heidi Esser Quist for their enduring friendship over the years. I am grateful to my dear friends Daniel Kasper, Jayda Coons, Grace Chen, and Ruixue Zhang, inaugural members of the Victorian Salon, which has been a source of intellectual community and solidarity over the last few years. Whatever our souls are made of, theirs and mine are the same. I also want to recognize Matt Kundert, Jane Benacquista, Emily Thomas, Jon LaGuardia, Kim Wine, Carie Schneider, and Sovay Hansen, to name just a few of the friends who, in addition to helping me refine ideas on many occasions and contributing to my intellectual development, have become like a second family to me. Special thanks are due to the organizers of the 2015 North American Victorian Studies Association Professionalization Workshop. This experience was incredibly important in my growth as a scholar of Victorian literature and culture. I am especially grateful to Pamela Gilbert and Dennis Denisoff for helping me see the problems in my dissertation project and placing me on a more productive course. I must also recognize my dear circle of “Ne’er Do Wells,” especially Michael Harwick, Meg Dobbins, Anne Sullivan, Mimi Winick, Mackenzie Gregg, Sophia Hsu, Lindsey Chappell, Lorenzo Servitje, and Miranda Marraccini, who have continued to encourage and inspire one another from afar. Thank you for being a part of my life. The greatest thanks of all are due to my large and loving family, whose faith and encouragement has been constant, and has carried me through many ups and downs. I love you all so much. Finally, I thank Dan Pinney, for being there for me no matter what. 5 TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES..........................................................................................................6 ABSTRACT.....................................................................................................................7 INTRODUCTION............................................................................................................8 Beyond the Tangled Bank CHAPTER 1...................................................................................................................23 “O Little Isle!”: Landscape, Englishness, and Apocalypse in The Last Man and The War of the Worlds CHAPTER 2...................................................................................................................48 Ghosts that Matter: Hyperobjects and Wuthering Heights CHAPTER 3...................................................................................................................95 Alice Under Glass: Classifying the Human in Victorian Visual Culture and Lewis Carroll’s Alice Books CHAPTER 4.................................................................................................................138 The Master’s Voice: Victorian New Media, Information Theory, and Dracula APPENDIX A...............................................................................................................166 Publications and Permissions BIBLIOGRAPHY.........................................................................................................167 6 LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Examples of Linley Sambourne’s “Designs after Nature”............................131 Figure 2: Detail, “The Kittens’ Tea and Croquet Party”...............................................131 Figure 3: Detail, “The Kitten Wedding”.......................................................................132 Figure 4a: The White Rabbit.........................................................................................132 Figure 4b: Kitten Wedding Guest..................................................................................132 Figure 5: Xie Kitchin in Chinese Dress.........................................................................133 Figure 6: Agnes Weld as Little Red Riding Hood.........................................................133 Figure 7a: Alice Liddell in her Best Dress.....................................................................134 Figure 7b: Alice as “The Beggar Maid”.........................................................................134 Figure 8: Xie Kitchin Lying on a Sofa...........................................................................134 Figure 9: Dodgson’s illustration of Alice in the Pool of Tears......................................135 Figure 10: Tenniel’s illustration for “A Caucus Race and a Long Tail”........................135 Figure 11: Dodgson’s illustration of Bill the Lizard......................................................136 Figure 12: Tenniel’s illustration for “Pig and Pepper”...................................................136 Figure 13: Alice Liddell as Pomona...............................................................................137 7 ABSTRACT The first generation of humans to live in a world indelibly marked by industrialism came of age in the nineteenth century. Industrialism set a pace of rapid social, economic, and environmental change that would come to define the Victorian era, and that would reverberate from England throughout the entire world. The advances of the period that afforded insights into the connections between the macro and the micro in physics, biology, geology, and other branches of the natural sciences, as well as the networks of trade and communication being laid down across the globe as part of the project of imperialist expansion and exploitation, all called new attention to the entangled relations of humans, human-created institutions and technologies, and nonhuman nature. The nineteenth-century British texts that are the subject of this study engage with these entangled relations in ways that call into question what it means to be human. Since the poststructuralist turn, scholarly work on the Victorian era touching questions of human subjectivity has often emphasized how the dominant power structures of the nineteenth century—white heteropatriarchy, industrial capitalism, and imperialism—upheld a model of human subjective measured against the standard of the white able-bodied man of property, and heavily invested in enforcing rigid hierarchies of race, class, and gender. I argue that the works of literature in this study demonstrate that the category of the human

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