Victorian Environmental Nightmares

The twelve essays in Victorian Environmental Nightmares explore various "environmental nightmares" through applied analyses of Victorian texts. Over the course of the nineteenth century, writers of imaginative literature often expressed fears and concerns over environmental degradation (in its wide variety of meanings, including social and moral). In some instances, natural or environmental disasters influenced these responses; in other instances a growing awareness of problems caused by industrial pollution and the growth of cities prompted responses. Seven essays in this volume cover works about Britain and its current and former colonies that examine these nightmare environments at home and abroad. But as the remaining five essays in this collection demonstrate, "environmental nightmares" are not restricted to essays on actual disasters or realistic fiction, since in many cases Victorian writers projected onto imperial landscapes or wholly imagined landscapes in fantastic fiction their anxieties about how humans might change their environments--and how these environments might also change humans.

1. Introduction -- 2. Sara Atwood, "The Assumption of the Dragon: Ruskins Mythic Vision" -- 3. Mary Sanders Pollock, "Elizabeth Barrett Brownings Failed Pastoral and the Environments of the Poor" -- 4. Allen MacDuffie, "Pips Nightmare and Orlicks Dream" -- 5. Ronald D. Morrison, "Frances Trollopes Domestic Manners of the Americans and the EcoGothic" -- 6. John Miller, "James Thomsons Deserts" -- 7. Susan K. Martin, "'Tragic ring-barked forests and the 'Wicked Wood: Haunting Environmental Anxiety in Late Nineteenth-Century Australian Literature" -- 8. Alicia Carroll, "'Rivers Change like Nations: Reading Eco-Apocalypse in The Waters of Edera" -- 9. Naomi Wood, "Disaster and Deserts: Childrens Natural History as Nightmare and Dream" -- 10. Jade Munslow Ong, "Imperial Ecologies and Extinction in H.G. Wellss Island Stories" -- 11. Shun Kiang, "Human Intervention and More-Than-Human Humanity in H.G. Wellss The Island of Doctor Moreau" -- 12. Susan M. Bernardo, "Nowhere to Go: Caught Between Nature and Culture in Oscar Wildes Fairy Tales" -- 13. Mark Frost, "Ecocrisis and Slow Violence: Anthropocene Readings of Late-Victorian Disaster Narratives."