Novel Environments: Science, Description, and Victorian Fiction

The environment concept has shaped humanity's relationship to the natural world, but it was in the descriptive worldmaking of the Victorian novel that it was first transformed from an abstraction into a vivid object of imagination and feeling. Novel Environments: Science, Description, and Victorian Fiction reconstructs a longer—and a specifically literary—history, showing how novelistic description helped to produce the modern environment concept and how literary form has shaped the ecological ideas through which we apprehend the nonhuman world.

Format: Hardback
Length: 224 pages
Publication date: 07 July 2023
Publisher: Oxford University Press

The concept of the environment has profoundly shaped humanity's relationship with the natural world, raising awareness of the impact of human actions on our surroundings. While scholars have traditionally attributed the emergence of this concept to twentieth-century ecological and political thought, Novel Environments: Science, Description, and Victorian Fiction offers a more comprehensive reconstruction of its historical roots.

In the descriptive world-making of the Victorian novel, the environment underwent a remarkable transformation. Authors such as Mary Russell Mitford, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Robert Louis Stevenson engaged with the scientific theories of their contemporaries to craft vivid and intricate descriptions of gardens, landscapes, weather, and atmospheres. Rather than serving as mere static backgrounds, these descriptions modeled the dynamic interactions between life and its surroundings.

Novel Environments reclaims the scientific vocabulary employed by nineteenth-century writers and novelists to describe the environments of living organisms. The term "environment" now dominates our language when discussing the nonhuman world, but in the Victorian era, there existed a broader conceptual lexicon that included terms such as milieu, medium, and circumstance. Jayne Hildebrand traces the development of Victorian environmental thought from the earliest theorization of physical surroundings as a dynamic influence in the life sciences, through the idea of a singular medium in mid-century organicism, to the emergence of environmentalism in the late nineteenth century.

Through this rich and detailed exploration, Novel Environments sheds light on the complex and multifaceted ways in which the concept of the environment has evolved and influenced human understanding of the natural world. It demonstrates the ways in which literature and science can collaborate to deepen our understanding of the environment and inspire us to take action to protect and preserve it for future generations.

Weight: 388g
Dimension: 225 x 145 x 16 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780192888471