Pastoral in Early-Victorian Fiction: Environment and Modernity

The monograph will situate pastoral in the light of recent scholarship and nineteenth-century critical debates, and analyse its functions across a range of early-Victorian fiction. Arguing that there are no pastoral novels, but that pastoral is ubiquitous in Victorian prose, the monograph underlines the instability and malleability of pastoral forms, oppositions, and concepts. The monograph also connects pastoral to recent critical interest across the environmental humanities and social sciences in boundaries and intersectionalities (nature-culture, human-non-human, material-non-material); and to Anthropocene debates about human and natural histories, environmental violence and social justice, and climate, technology, and science. In doing so, the rural-urban nexus, socio-economic systems, social and environmental hierarchies, sovereignty and environment, environmental commodification, and pollution become important themes. The monograph will provide comprehensive coverage from 1837 to 1859, a significant period of indiustrial expansion and environmental destruction, and will include mainstream Victorian fiction, historical novels, penny dreadfuls, chartist fiction, children's fiction, adventure novels, and silver-fork fiction.