LITERARY STUDIES | ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES HENSLEY STEER “ e editors have organized Ecological Form in a way that makes it into a syllabus: e categories of Method, Form, Scale, and Futures could structure a semester, and Ecological Form Ecological the range of literary forms—the novel, poetry, drama, and non ction 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 Ecological Form brings together leading voices in nineteenth-century ecocriticism Ecoloical Form to suture the lingering divide between postcolonial and ecocritical approaches. Together, these essays show how Victorian thinkers used aesthetic form to engage problems of system, interconnection, and dispossession that remain our own. e authors reconsider Victorian literary structures in light of environmental catastrophe, coordinate “natural” questions with sociopolitical ones, and underscore the category of form as a means for generating environmental—and therefore political— System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire the of in Age and Aesthetics System knowledge. Moving from the elegy and the industrial novel to the utopian romance, System and Aesthetics the scienti c treatise, and beyond, Ecological Form demonstrates how nineteenth- in the Age of Empire century thinkers conceptualized the circuits of extraction and violence linking Britain to its global network. Yet the book’s most pressing argument is that this past thought can be a resource for reimagining the present. CONTRIBUTORS: Monique Allewaert, Sukanya Banerjee, Adam Grener, Nathan K. Hensley, Deanna K. Kreisel, Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, Benjamin Morgan, Karen Pinkus, Aaron Rosenberg, Teresa Shewry, Philip Steer, Jesse Oak Taylor, Lynn Voskuil Nathan K. Hensley NATHAN K. HENSLEY is Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University. Philip Steer PHILIP STEER is Senior Lecturer in English at Massey University. Editors Afterword by KAREN PINKUS is Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. Karen Pinkus Fordham University Press | New York www.fordhampress.com Cover image: Illustration by Henry Bradbury of Polypodium Robertianum, in omas Moore’s e Ferns of Great Britain and Ireland (1857). From the New York Public Library Digital Collections. Cover design by Ann Christine Racette FORDHAM Ecological Form 119114-Hensley_EcologicalForm.indd9114-Hensley_EcologicalForm.indd i 110/18/180/18/18 11:56:56 PPMM 119114-Hensley_EcologicalForm.indd9114-Hensley_EcologicalForm.indd iiii 110/18/180/18/18 11:56:56 PPMM Ecological Form System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire Nathan K. Hensley and Philip Steer Editors fordham university press New York 2019 119114-Hensley_EcologicalForm.indd9114-Hensley_EcologicalForm.indd iiiiii 110/18/180/18/18 11:56:56 PPMM Copyright © 2019 Fordham University Press ThiAll s work rights is licensed reserved. under No parta Creative of this Commons publication Attributi may beon- NonCommercial-NoDerivativesreproduced, stored in a retrieval 4.0system, International or transmitted License. in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy,Copyright recording, © 2018 Fordhamor any other—except University Press for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission All rights reserved.of No the part publisher. of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in Fordhamany form University or by any Pressmeans— has electronic,no responsibility mechanical, for the perphotocopy,sistence or accuracy recording, of orURLs any other—for external except or forthird- briefparty quotationsInternet websites in printed referred reviews, to in withoutthis publication the prior and permission does not guarantee that any ofcontent the publisher. on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the perFordham sistence orUniversity accuracy Pressof URLs also for publishes external its or books third- in party a varietyInternet of websites electronic referred formats. to in Some this publication content that and appears does not in guaranteeprint may that not any be content available on insuch electronic websites books. is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a varietyLibrary of electronic of Congress formats. Cataloging-in-Publication Some content that appears Data in printavailable may not online be available at https:// incatalog electronic.loc .books.gov. VisitPrinted us online in the at United www.fordhampress States of Ameri . com.ca 20 19 18 54 3 2 1 Library of CongressFirst Cataloging- edition in- Publication Data available online at https:// catalog . loc . gov. Printed in the United States of Amer i ca 20 19 18 54 3 2 1 First edition 153-71159_ch00_3P.indd 4 11/1/17 11:56 AM 153-71159_ch00_3P.indd 4 11/1/17 11:56 AM contents Introduction: Ecological Formalism; or, Love among the Ruins nathan k. hensley and philip steer 1 Part I method 1. Drama, Ecology, and the Ground of Empire: The Play of Indigo sukanya banerjee 21 2. Mourning Species: In Memoriam in an Age of Extinction jesse oak taylor 42 3. Signatures of the Carboniferous: The Literary Forms of Coal nathan k. hensley and philip steer 63 Part II form 4. Fixed Capital and the Flow: Water Power, Steam Power, and The Mill on the Floss elizabeth carolyn miller 85 5. “Form Against Force”: Sustainability and Organicism in the Work of John Ruskin deanna k. kreisel 101 6. Mapping the “Invisible Region, Far Away” in Dombey and Son adam grener 121 Part III scale 7. How We Might Live: Utopian Ecology in William Morris and Samuel Butler benjamin morgan 139 v 119114-Hensley_EcologicalForm.indd9114-Hensley_EcologicalForm.indd v 110/18/180/18/18 11:56:56 PPMM vi Contents 8. From Specimen to System: Botanical Scale and the Environmental Sublime in Joseph Dalton Hooker’s Himalayas lynn voskuil 161 9. “Infi nitesimal Lives”: Thomas Hardy’s Scale Effects aaron rosenberg 182 Part IV futures 10. Electric Dialectics: Delany’s Atlantic Materialism monique allewaert 203 11. Satire’s Ecology teresa shewry 223 Afterword: They Would Have Ended by Burning Their Own Globe karen pinkus 241 Acknowledgments 249 List of Contributors 251 Index 253 119114-Hensley_EcologicalForm.indd9114-Hensley_EcologicalForm.indd vivi 110/18/180/18/18 11:56:56 PPMM Ecological Form 119114-Hensley_EcologicalForm.indd9114-Hensley_EcologicalForm.indd viivii 110/18/180/18/18 11:56:56 PPMM 119114-Hensley_EcologicalForm.indd9114-Hensley_EcologicalForm.indd viiiviii 110/18/180/18/18 11:56:56 PPMM introduction Ecological Formalism; or, Love Among the Ruins Nathan K. Hensley and Philip Steer Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam- navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground—what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour? —KARL MARX AND FRIEDRICH ENGELS, The Communist Manifesto (1848) In the gloom she did not mind speaking freely. —THOMAS HARDY, Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) For Marx and Engels in 1848, European modernity was a world- demolishing juggernaut, an engine of vast productivity and vaster catastrophe. To these most sensitive observers of contemporary life, the new industrial age, pow- ered by burned coal and the brute labor of newly urbanized masses, was most recognizable as a terraforming project. Altered chemistry, moved earth, rerouted rivers: Capitalism was a continent- clearing attack on nature at world scale, a magic act by which plants, wealth, and even human popula- tions could be created as though from nothing—“conjured out of the ground.” In this steam- driven and electrifi ed present, humankind or an empowered subset of it, enriched by extraction and aided by machine tech- nology, could enslave the very forces of nature (Naturkräfte), and, like Xerxes whipping the Hellespont in Herodotus’s famous parable of outland- ish pride, alter the fl ow of waters on earth. Modernity’s self- infl icted demise was incipient or imminent to Marx and Engels: They anticipated the bour- geois world’s terminal crisis as future revolution, augured in stories of chastened hubris and tragedy inherited from the Greeks. To twenty- fi rst- century observers, by contrast, the generalized death drive of western life is palpable, legible, here and now. The earth and its 1 119114-Hensley_EcologicalForm.indd9114-Hensley_EcologicalForm.indd 1 110/18/180/18/18 11:56:56 PPMM 2 Nathan K. Hensley and Philip Steer interlocked systems now seem a material laboratory for proving not just Marx’s observation about capitalism’s tendency toward suicide, but also Freud’s late- career discovery, stunning even to himself, that a sentient organism might somehow desire, and then willingly pursue, its own destruction.1 Ice shelves collapse and glaciers retreat; particulate plastic swirls in eddies the size of continents; species vanish at rates not seen since an asteroid restarted the clock of evolution; and the weather of our daily lives