Victorian Environmental Nightmares

Laurence W. Mazzeno is President Emeritus of Alvernia University in Reading, Pennsylvania, USA.Ronald D. Morrison is Professor of English at Morehead State University in Morehead, Kentucky, USA.

• 1. Introduction.- 2. Sara Atwood, “The Assumption of the Dragon: Ruskin’s Mythic Vision”.- 3. Mary Sanders Pollock, “Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Failed Pastoral and the Environments of the Poor”.- 4. Allen MacDuffie, “Pip’s Nightmare and Orlick’s Dream”.- 5. Ronald D. Morrison, “Frances Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans and the EcoGothic”.- 6. John Miller, “James Thomson’s Deserts”.- 7. Susan K. Martin, “‘Tragic ring-barked forests’ and the ‘Wicked Wood’: Haunting Environmental Anxiety in Late Nineteenth-Century Australian Literature”.- 8. Alicia Carroll, “‘Rivers Change like Nations’: Reading Eco-Apocalypse in The Waters of Edera”.- 9. Naomi Wood, “Disaster and Deserts: Children’s Natural History as Nightmare and Dream”.- 10. Jade Munslow Ong, “Imperial Ecologies and Extinction in H. G. Wells’s Island Stories”.- 11. Shun Kiang, “Human Intervention and More-Than-Human Humanity in H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau”.- 12.Susan M. Bernardo, “Nowhere to Go: Caught Between Nature and Culture in Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales”.- 13. Mark Frost, “Ecocrisis and Slow Violence: Anthropocene Readings of Late-Victorian Disaster Narratives”.

“The collection is an important intervention in Victorian environmental criticism and one of the first full-length works to address this subject. … Overall, the collection succeeds in providing a fresh direction for Victorian ecocriticism, suggesting several pathways for new work in the field … . In itself, it is a valuable resource for all scholars interested in nineteenth-century understandings of the world beyond the human animal.” (Ailise Bulfin, Victorian Studies, Vol. 63 (3), 2021)