Adrian Tait – författare

This innovative new book combines environmental justice scholarship with a material ecocriticism to explore the way in which early Victorian literature (1837–1860) responded to the growing problem of environmental injustice. As this book emphasises, environmental injustice – simply, the convergence of poverty and pollution – was not an isolated phenomenon, but a structural form of inequality; a product of industrial modernity’s radical reformation of British society, it particularly affected the working classes. As each chapter reveals in detail, this form of environmental inequality (or ‘classism’) drew sharply critical reactions from figures as diverse as Thomas Carlyle, Friedrich Engels, Charles Dickens, and John Ruskin, and from within the Chartist movement, as working-class writers themselves reacted to the hazardous realities of a divided society. But as this book also reveals, these writers recognised that a truly just society respects the needs of the nonhuman and takes account of the material world in all its own aliveness; even if only tentatively, they reached for a more inclusive, emergent form of justice that might address the social and ecological impacts of industrial modernity, an idea which is no less relevant today.This book represents an indispensable resource for scholars and students working in the fields of Victorian literature, environmental justice, and ecocriticism.

This innovative new book combines environmental justice scholarship with a material ecocriticism to explore the way in which early Victorian literature (1837–1860) responded to the growing problem of environmental injustice. As this book emphasises, environmental injustice – simply, the convergence of poverty and pollution – was not an isolated phenomenon, but a structural form of inequality; a product of industrial modernity’s radical reformation of British society, it particularly affected the working classes. As each chapter reveals in detail, this form of environmental inequality (or ‘classism’) drew sharply critical reactions from figures as diverse as Thomas Carlyle, Friedrich Engels, Charles Dickens, and John Ruskin, and from within the Chartist movement, as working-class writers themselves reacted to the hazardous realities of a divided society. But as this book also reveals, these writers recognised that a truly just society respects the needs of the nonhuman and takes account of the material world in all its own aliveness; even if only tentatively, they reached for a more inclusive, emergent form of justice that might address the social and ecological impacts of industrial modernity, an idea which is no less relevant today.This book represents an indispensable resource for scholars and students working in the fields of Victorian literature, environmental justice, and ecocriticism.

Adrian Tait argues that late-Victorian stories represent an important but still neglected part of a green literary tradition, setting up a dialogue with modernity that is no less relevant today.Late-Victorian literature is full of fascinating examples of what was then called the “scientific romance,” an emerging form of science or speculative fiction whose concern with the liveliness – or “agentiality” – of the nonhuman animal and more-than-human, natural world today makes it particularly noteworthy. In a succession of short stories and novels, many now forgotten, writers such as Grant Allen, John Davidson, George Griffith, and Henry Marriott Watson dramatized the possibility that “Nature” had not been “conquered” by industrial modernity, but might instead be reacting to it with an unexpected dynamism. Long before environmental issues such as climate change came to the public’s attention, they asked whether humankind might one day inadvertently create existential threats to its own survival. In so doing, these pioneers of sf depicted their world in terms that anticipate the recent new materialist focus on a mutable and dynamic reality, responsive and perhaps resistant to human endeavor.