TY - CHAP
T1 - Industry and environmental violence in the early Victorian novel: pastoral re-visions
AU - Frost, Mark
N1 - Output does not have an abstract or a DOI
PY - 2023/9/1
Y1 - 2023/9/1
N2 - While industrial activity has long characterised the countryside, pastoral’s tendency to idealise and valorise farming life often pushes other forms of economic activity to the representational peripheries. Although predominantly focused on the social life of the countryside, Victorian novels do, however, show some interest in industry, industrial workers, and labour migrations, as well as the environmental impacts of mining, quarrying, smelting, and milling. Examining relevant depictions from Harriet Martineau’s Deerbrook (1839), Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil (1845), Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849), and George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859), this chapter explores issues of environmental and social injustice, adapting Timothy Morton’s concept of agrilogistics, and thinking through Anthropocene concerns about slow violence, demographics, and resources. At the same time this chapter will situate representations of rural industry in pastoral contexts in order to examine whether they replicate or complicate the inherent division in traditional pastoral between urban and rural. This chapter will argue that these texts largely reflect a process by which the division between urban and rural was being placed under strain, and often rendered meaningless, by the expansion into the countryside of intensified capitalist networks of environmental violence and technological control.
AB - While industrial activity has long characterised the countryside, pastoral’s tendency to idealise and valorise farming life often pushes other forms of economic activity to the representational peripheries. Although predominantly focused on the social life of the countryside, Victorian novels do, however, show some interest in industry, industrial workers, and labour migrations, as well as the environmental impacts of mining, quarrying, smelting, and milling. Examining relevant depictions from Harriet Martineau’s Deerbrook (1839), Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil (1845), Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849), and George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859), this chapter explores issues of environmental and social injustice, adapting Timothy Morton’s concept of agrilogistics, and thinking through Anthropocene concerns about slow violence, demographics, and resources. At the same time this chapter will situate representations of rural industry in pastoral contexts in order to examine whether they replicate or complicate the inherent division in traditional pastoral between urban and rural. This chapter will argue that these texts largely reflect a process by which the division between urban and rural was being placed under strain, and often rendered meaningless, by the expansion into the countryside of intensified capitalist networks of environmental violence and technological control.
KW - environment
KW - pastoral
KW - Charlotte Bronte
KW - Harriet Martineau
KW - George Eliot
KW - Benjamin Disraeli
KW - industry
KW - environmental violence
KW - ecocriticism
KW - Victorian literature
M3 - Chapter (peer-reviewed)
SN - 9781843846970
T3 - Essays and Studies
SP - 7
EP - 27
BT - The Literature and Politics of the Environment
A2 - Parham, John
PB - Boydell and Brewer Ltd
CY - Woodbridge
ER -