Shane McCorristine

Mapping Common Ground: Ecocriticism, Environmental History, and the Environmental Humanities

The emergence of the environmental humanities presents a unique opportunity for scholarship to tackle the human dimensions of the environmental crisis. It might finally allow such work to attain the critical mass it needs to break out of customary disciplinary confines and reach a wider public, at a time when natural scientists have begun to acknowledge that an understanding of the environmental crisis must include insights from the humanities and social sciences. In order to realize this potential, scholars in the environmental humanities need to map the common ground on which close interdisciplinary cooperation will be possible. This essay takes up this task with regard to two fields that have embraced the environmental humanities with particular fervour, namely ecocriticism and environmental history. After outlining an ideal of slow scholarship which cultivates thinking across different spatiotemporal scales and seeks to sustain meaningful public debate, the essay argues that both ecocriticism and environmental history are concerned with practices of environing: each studies the material and symbolic transformations by which “the environment” is configured as a space for human action. Three areas of research are singled out as offering promising models for cooperation between ecocriticism and environmental history: eco-historicism, environmental justice, and new materialism. Bringing the fruits of such efforts to a wider audience will require environmental humanities scholars to experiment with new ways of organizing and disseminating knowledge.

Spectres of the Self: Thinking about Ghosts and Ghost-Seeing in England, 1750–1920

Introduction Part I. The Dreams of the Ghost-Seers: 1. The haunted mind, 1750-1850 2. Seeing is believing?: Ghost-seeing and hallucinatory experience Part II. A Science of the Soul: 3. Ghost-hunting in the Society for Psychical Research 4. Phantasms of the living and the dead 5. The concept of hallucination in late-Victorian psychology Epilogue: towards 1920 Appendix Bibliography.

The Dark Value of Criminal Bodies: Context, Consent, and the Disturbing Sale of John Parker’s Skull

The recent sale of a human skull at an auction in Sussex should raise ethical concerns. Whenever human body parts are sold or put in a glass case and displayed for public view people should be provided with context and extensively informed about what they see. The gaze is never innocent, and to ignore the particular journeys that body parts take into auction rooms, anatomy departments, and museums is to be complicit in acts of historical injustice. In this case the skull was that of John Parker, who was executed by hanging in 1813. The likelihood that this was illicitly obtained by medical professionals means that the sale of the skull at auction two hundred years later is fraught with ethical problems. Along with a discussion of context, fragments like Parker’s skull must therefore also become part of a debate about consent. Issues of context and consent can help us think about the display of human remains in museums in a manner that is intimate and ‘disturbingly informative’ (Mütter Museum 2014). However, the sale of Parker’s skull – described as an ‘antique piece’ in the press coverage (BBC News 2014) – is a reminder that the global marketplace in objectified body parts is disturbing in quite a different manner.1

The Criminal Body Remembered

The families of Corder and Maria Martin suffered after his execution. The journeys of Corder’s criminal body did not stop after his own death as he gained a series of afterlives in popular culture. Corder became a product in the society of spectacle and appeared as a waxwork, on theatrical stage, at fairgrounds, and ghost shows. The boundary between reality and representation became porous as criminal acts began to be associated with Red Barn plays, while Red Barn plays became linked with crime. The scene of the murder was deconstructed by relic hunters as remembering Corder turned into a macabre marketplace. In the dismemberment of Corder spectacles become materials, and in the remembrance of Corder materials become spectacles.

The Murder in the Red Barn

On 18 May 1827, the son of a respectable farmer, William Corder, murdered his lover Maria Martin in the Red Barn, a storage building on his land, in Polstead. The discovery of this murder the following year set off a feeding-frenzy in which Corder’s body became consumed in different ways. The extent to which Corder’s body was carved up, and his crime endlessly replayed, remains astounding to this day. His body was sent on a series of journeys that would have it measured, convulsed, staged, and re-staged. Corder was arrested in London and was tried and convicted of murder in August 1828. He was sentenced to be hung and anatomized and his execution was witnessed by thousands in Bury St Edmunds.

The Criminal Body Dismembered

Corder became a celebrity corpse, drawing thousands to witness the spectacle of his post-mortem punishment. The first journey of this deviant flesh was to the Shire Hall in Bury where the body was cut open for the public to view. Corder was then sent to local anatomists who galvanized and dissected the corpse. Details of this were sent to the newspaper press and casts and busts were made of Corder’s head which were analysed by phrenologists seeking to locate his criminal propensities. Corder continued to be dismembered by the surgeons: his skin was used to bind a book; his scalp was removed and displayed; and his skeleton was articulated and displayed in the hospital.

The Spectral Presence of the Franklin Expedition in Contemporary Fiction

This essay highlights the spectral analogies between the attempts to discover the fate of Sir John Franklins Arctic expedition in the 1850s, and the sudden eruption of novels in the 1990s dealing with its demise. In both cases, supernatural tropes occupied a central role in how Western audiences confronted Arctic disaster. A thematic survey focusing on two novels demonstrates how contemporary mappings of Arctic exploration utilize spectral motifs in reconstructing Victorian trauma.

Ghost hands, hands of glory, and manumission in the fiction of Sheridan Le Fanu

This essay corrects a critical blindspot in the study of Anglo-Irish literature through contextualising meanings of the hand as they appeared in the fiction of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–73). From stylised fetish object in ‘An Authentic Narrative of the Ghost of a Hand’ (1863), to symbol of the authors presence in the text in Wylders Hand (1864), to centrepiece of a dizzying referential system in ‘The Haunted Baronet’ (1870), Le Fanus fiction demonstrates significant indebtedness to the legend of the ‘hand of glory’. Le Fanu used this rich reference point to express the terminal insecurity of the social masters who are not free, who are in fact themselves enslaved and stupefied for reasons beyond their control. With the spectre of Catholic resurgence in mid-nineteenth-century Ireland, the impossibility of manumission from the hands that haunt functioned as a reminder of the weight of the past in Le Fanus literary imagination.