Haunting Ecologies: Victorian Conceptions of Water

by Ursula Kluwick

Overview

Victorians’ views of water and its role in how the social fabric of Victorian Britain was imagined

Water matters like few other substances in people’s daily lives. In the nineteenth century, it left its traces on politics, urban reform, and societal divisions, as well as on conceptualizations of gender roles. Drawing on the methodology of material ecocriticism, Ursula Kluwick’s Haunting Ecologies argues that Victorian Britons were keenly aware of aquatic agency, recognizing water as an active force with the ability to infiltrate bodies and spaces.
    
Kluwick reads works by canonical writers such as Braddon, Dickens, Stoker, and George Eliot alongside sanitary reform discourse, court cases, journalistic articles, satirical cartoons, technical drawings, paintings, and maps. This wide-ranging study sheds new light on Victorian-era anxieties about water contamination as well as on how certain wet landscapes such as sewers, rivers, and marshes became associated with moral corruption and crime. Applying ideas from the field of blue humanities to nineteenth-century texts, Haunting Ecologies argues for the relevance of realism as an Anthropocene form.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813950990
Publisher:	University of Virginia Press
Publication date:	06/18/2024
Series:	Victorian Literature and Culture Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	2 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Ursula Kluwick is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Bern, Switzerland, and coeditor of The Beach in Anglophone Literatures and Cultures.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Beyond Water as a Symbol

Part I. Water and Pollution

1. Aquatic Discourse in the Era of Sanitary Reform: Water, Public Health, and the River Thames

2. The Aesthetics of Pollution: Charles Dickens's (In)Sanitary Waters

Part II. Water and Transgression

3. Aquatic Social Space: The Imaginary Topography of Transgression

4. Floating Across: Water as Embodied Transgression

Conclusion: New Horizons for the Blue Humanities

Notes

Bibliography

Index

What People are Saying About This

Pamela Gilbert

Kluwick takes on a large topic with brio but also with careful attention. This is an unusually comprehensive and wide-ranging book, full of fresh insights about Victorian literature and culture.

Editorial Reviews

Kluwick takes on a large topic with brio but also with careful attention. This is an unusually comprehensive and wide-ranging book, full of fresh insights about Victorian literature and culture.”—Pamela Gilbert, University of Florida, author of Victorian Skin: Surface, Self, History
 

From the Publisher