Jesse O. Taylor

WHERE IS VICTORIAN ECOCRITICISM

The most striking thing about reviewing the field of Victorian ecocriticism is that there is so little of it. This relative absence is all the more perplexing given that ecocritical work on Romanticism and nineteenth-century American literature is so profuse. Thoreau and Wordsworth remain the most-discussed authors in a field that was in many respects inaugurated by Jonathan Bates Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (1991) and Lawrence Buells The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing and the Formation of American Culture (1995). Romanticism remains the point of departure for some of the most influential studies in the field, including those like Timothy Mortons Ecology Without Nature (2009) that challenge many of its core precepts. Meanwhile, ecocriticism has expanded to include many other periods and regions, with collections ranging from The Ecocritical Shakespeare (2011) to Postcolonial Ecologies (2011), and unsurprisingly, a strong turn toward the contemporary.

Auras and Ice Cores Atmospheric Archives and the Anthropocene

This article traces the implications of thinking about the Anthropocene from the perspective of the archives that make it visible, placing ice-core data and scientific research on historical climate alongside ideas of the archive in historiography and the humanities. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s notion of the “aura” of a work of art or cultural artifact, it offers an atmospheric conception of history attending to the ways in which humans, nonhumans, artifacts, and nature interpenetrate one another. Furthermore, it points to the ways in which the language of archives, curators, and libraries is shared between the sciences and humanities in the interests of opening new forms of interdisciplinary inquiry in the shared project of coming to terms with anthropogenic climate change and a geologic age defined by human action.

The Age of Analogy: Science and Literature Between the Darwins

The theory of evolution was poetry before it became science, each time with a Darwin behind the pen. The relationship between Charles Darwin and his grandfather Erasmus has long proven a conundrum ...