Victorian Literature, Queer Longing and the Shore, 1840–1920

Barbara Barrow is Associate Professor of English at Lund University in Sweden, where she is also a member of the Lund Environmental Humanities Hub. Her research interests include nineteenth-century and neo-Victorian literature, women, gender, and sexuality, and the environmental humanities. She is the author of Science, Language, and Reform in Victorian Poetry: Political Dialects (2019), and of articles on queer marine collecting, queer botany, feminized environmental disaster, and deep time that have appeared in CUSP, Victorian Poetry, Ecocene, Victoriographies, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, and elsewhere.

In identifying and exploring a literary space she calls the “queer littoral”, Barbara Barrow locates at the Victorian seashore a key moment in the changing human relationship with the ocean. Drawing on recent work in blue humanities, littoral studies, queer theory, and other areas, Barrow combines deft textual analyses with a broad sense of how the queer littoral can help reshape our understanding of Victorian eco-poetics. A compelling re-reading of the episode of the lotus eaters in The Odyssey in ecological as well as queer terms germinates into a powerful lens on Victorian literary culture’s fascination with the beach. This book provides an illuminating extension of current practices in watery criticism. Readers interested in queer theory, blue humanities, and eco-poetics will find much of value here.

• Acknowledgments Introduction: Victorian Literature and the Queer Littoral1. Queer Odysseus, Victorian Shores2. New Women and Pleasure Boats3. Of Venuses and Mermaids: Littoral Ekphrasis4. A Queer Variety of Natural HistoryCoda: Neo-Victorianism at the Water’s EdgeBibliography