In reflecting on the fragile material ecologies of the former British Empire, postcolonial writers have shown how the transformations of the colonial era continue to shape the environmental vulnerabilities of the present. This overlap between colonial pasts and ecological futures is especially visible, as this essay will suggest, in literary imaginaries of the ‘floating city’. While floating cities and islands have featured in imaginative literature from Homer to Verne, they also surface at different moments in the specific history of Hong Kong. Dung Kai-cheung, in his ‘fictional archaeology’ published in the year of the handover from Britain, describes Hong Kong as a ‘marvellous invention’ and as a ‘mirage’ – an island ‘born from the waves of the sea’ whose towers extend into the air. Writing in the same year, Ackbar Abbas remarks on the city’s ‘“floating” identity’ as a space of flows in which ‘everything floats – currencies, values, human relations’. More recently, Leonard Kwok-kou Chan has emphasised Hong Kong’s status as ‘a floating city’ due to the uniqueness of its literary culture. Across these accounts, metaphors of floating capture the distinctiveness of Hong Kong’s identity, whether as a colonial entrepôt turned ‘cosmopolitan’ financial centre, or as an archipelago comprising over 250 islands and one of the most vertical cities in the world.

These floating metaphors also appear in an earlier wave of texts, written towards the end of British rule, where they serve to visualise Hong Kong’s colonial transformation in the nineteenth century. A noteworthy example is Timothy Mo’s historical novel An Insular Possession (1986), which draws on the image of the floating island to reconstruct Hong Kong’s inception during the First Opium War. Although the novel imagines the region in the pre-colonial period as an archipelago (its ‘[i]slands spread over the waters on both sides’, enveloped in ethereal cloud and ambiguously ‘locked by islands or continent’), it focuses on the region’s rapid transformation in the 1840s. Amid the new watery world of the opium trade, the novel conjures a terraqueous landscape of floating warehouses, floating barges, floating batteries, floating hotels, floating brothels, and floating opium hulks serviced by the smaller vessels of ‘fast crabs’ and ‘scrambling dragons’, whose ability to float secures the regime’s extra-territorial legality.

Post-Brexit, the question of new legislation around farming practices in the UK has been, and continues to be, an area of heated debate. In both political and agricultural circles, the UK’s departure from the European Union was initially hailed as an opportunity to break free from the outmoded Basic Payment Scheme of the Common Agricultural Policy: to devise new strategies to cease subsidising farmers for simply owning land, and expand existing initiatives to reward farmers for producing environmental benefits as well as food. 2022 saw major upheavals in British politics (including the appointment of two new Prime Ministers in quick succession), and the long-anticipated Environmental Land Management Scheme (ELMS) in England (a multitiered plan to ‘pay farmers and land managers to enhance the natural environment alongside food production’) became subject to further review. Ranil Jayawardena (briefly Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs between 6 September and 25 October 2022) sought to ‘set the record straight’ in terms of the Government’s ongoing commitment to nature-friendly farming, in a film produced for social media. However, both this and Jayawardena’s speech at the 2022 Conservative Party Conference were met with scepticism by wildlife charities, the National Trust, regenerative farmers, and high-profile environmental campaigners, such as Chris Packham. The appointment of Thérèse Coffey as Jayawardena’s substitute has been greeted with ‘some surprise – and hope – by [the] environment sector’, but the final format of ELMS remains in question.

In the midst of this upheaval and anxiety, it is easy to see how some farmers may feel that their livelihoods and farming practices are at the mercy of political expediency. Such debates are not limited to the political and agricultural spheres but exist in the context of radically divided public opinion on food production, in which, more often than not, farmers ‘are taking a bashing’, as James Rebanks puts it. ‘You can’t go on social media, turn on the TV or radio, or read a newspaper without someone telling you earnestly that farming is more or less the devil’s work and should be done away with at the earliest opportunity’. These cultural tensions have come to the fore with the publication of George Monbiot’s Regenesis: Feeding the World without Devouring the Planet (2022).

Science fiction (sf) is notoriously hard to define. As Sherryl Vint explains, it is a genre which is ostensibly interested in science, but also, importantly, in the ‘mythologies of science’. Alongside being a literary genre which has evolved over time – often propelled, especially in the early years, by the idiosyncratic visions of editors and publishers – it is also ‘a cultural mode that struggles with the implications of discoveries in science and technology for human social lives and philosophical conceptions’. As Adam Roberts describes in his book, Science Fiction (2000), one of the fundamental markers of sf tends to be an ‘encounter with difference’. Drawing on Darko Suvin’s foundational concept of the ‘novum’, he continues:

While the most recognisable forms of alterity in sf might be the ‘final frontier’ of outer space and the otherworldly others to be found there, a growing body of research has been focused on alterity closer to home: the hidden lifeworlds and subjectivities of nonhuman animals (NHAs) and plants. This ‘nonhuman turn’ in sf operates in tandem with a contemporary wave of sf and sf criticism focused on environmental concerns. These strands have coalesced in the shadow of imminent anthropogenic climate catastrophe in our current geological epoch, which has been (controversially) termed the Anthropocene. As plants and NHAs are increasingly entangled with technoscience and biotechnological inventions, sf accordingly struggles with the implications of those inventions not only for human lives, but also for the lives of the nonhuman others themselves. And as phenomena like global warming and pandemics disrupt supply chains and food systems, the need to acknowledge human entanglements with the nonhuman world is becoming undeniable. Importantly, then, sf also struggles with humans’ philosophical conceptions of how to relate to and understand the lives of nonhuman others, often questioning species boundaries and hierarchical relationality.

This chapter contends that early Victorian authors often reformulated pastoral modes in ways that disclosed anxieties about unprecedented environmental, sociopolitical, demographic, and technological change. Employing what I would like to call pastoral ecocriticism, I argue for pastoral’s enduring power, not as an archaic poetic mode centred on idyllic imaginings, but as the principal form through which western authors and artists have addressed the problematical relationship between definitions of culture and nature. I turn to four early Victorian novels which are keenly aware of industry and other ‘urban’ phenomena in ‘rural’ areas: Harriet Martineau’s Deerbrook (1839), Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil (1845), Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849), and George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859). They demonstrate the position of the British countryside within an international network of capitalist economic and environmental exploitation, substantiating John Miller’s claim that ‘the Victorian period is a pivotal stage in the nexus of ecological and political violence’. Under economic, social, and environmental pressure, traditional pastoral contrasts between rural (good) and urban (bad) break down in revealing ways. The novels undermine impulses towards simplistic pastoral idylls (representations of harmonious rural communities clearly distinct from their world-weary urban counterparts), instead finding in rural societies conflict and inequality, but also opportunity, diversity, and change. They reveal complex intersections between villages, towns, and cities (such as the presence of industries and crafts, the influence of city culture, and traffic between urban and rural) which traditional pastoral is incapable of representing.

Divisions between urban and rural were pressurised, and often rendered meaningless, by intensified capitalist networks of environmental violence and technological control that were clearly evident in the countryside. While small-scale industrial activity has long characterised rural economies, the tendency of conservative forms of pastoral to idealise agricultural life often obscures the farm labour that sustains both countryside and city, while also pushing other rural economic activities to the representational peripheries. Although strongly focused on the social life of agricultural communities, these novels, set in periods from 1799 to 1839, focus on the expanding rural industries, industrial workers, and labour migrations, and are sometimes aware of the environmental impacts of mining, quarrying, metalworking, and milling. Reflecting the changing Victorian and pre-Victorian countryside, and the varied state of its economic activities, they undercut the long-standing and illusory myth that the countryside rests on cultivation of land alone.

Much as the complexities of climate change and the Anthropocene have queried the limits and exclusions of literary representation, so, too, have the challenges recently presented by climate activism and intersectional environmentalism, animal rights, and even the ‘thing-power’ (as Jane Bennett puts it) of material forms like oil, plastic, and heavy metals. Social and protest movements have revived the question of whether there can be such a thing as an activist ecocriticism. These movements resurrect a still-unanswered question first posed by Jonathan Bate in 1991: can ecocriticism only concern itself with consciousness, or might it politicise literary criticism in a new way?

Attempting to respond, this volume coalesces around three interrelated strands: material ecologies, past and present British politics, and the act of writing itself. Contributors consider the ways in which literary form has foregrounded the complexities of both matter (in essays on water, sugar, and land) and political economics (from empire and nationalism to environmental justice movements and local and regional communities). The volume asks how life writing, nature writing, creative nonfiction, and autobiography, although genres entrenched in capitalist political realities, can also confront these by reinserting personal experience. Through such personal narratives, the volume addresses the extent to which literary ecocriticism might support Extinction Rebellion’s fifth principle, of establishing a cycle of ‘action, reflection and learning, and planning for more action’, to help repair a near fatally damaged world. Can we bring a more sustainable planet into being by focusing on those literary forms which can imagine the conditions and systems needed to do so?

The first three essays focus on place. Mark Frost looks at Victorian reworkings of the pastoral in novels by Harriet Martineau, George Eliot, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charlotte Brontë, whose innovations in genre help to reveal the operation and impact of political economy. Set in the industrialised coun tryside of the Midlands or North, the novels strip away pastoral’s idyllic idealisation of country life to reveal the ‘accelerating intersections of town and country’, and the imposition of environmental exploitation, air pollution, and economic globalisation. More broadly, they expose a mechanism of environmental sovereignty, an assumed ‘unquestioned right to do as we will with everything we describe as nonhuman and label as resource’, says Frost, a label which encompasses both industry and farming. Hence, these novels expose what Elizabeth Miller has called extractivist ecologies, a way of life that proceeds by depleting the future.

Referring to a poem by Bertolt Brecht, Hannah Arendt wrote that the dark times of early-twentieth century Europe were characterised not by an occlusion of the brightly lit world of public affairs but by the capacity of this world to hide its atrocities out in the open. Dark times, whenever they occur, happen in this way through the medium of some supposedly transparent rationalisation, Arendt writes. In Brecht’s ‘To Those Born Later’, written in exile in the late 1930s, the speaker appeals to future generations not to blame him too harshly for having failed to avert the catastrophe:

Thinking about the impasses of environmental politics today often feels like being in the position of Brecht’s speaker, striving to explain to some future society that the darkness did not look so dark, that it all seemed to happen in the plain light of day. It is a matter of learning to see the darkness for what it is. James Bridle has argued that this is a ‘new dark age’ precisely because our current, massively distributed, networked technologies cannot give the fully illuminated picture of the world that we believe technoscientific reason should do. Bridle argues that the task, then, must be to learn to live in the absence of enlightenment’s certainty, to inhabit the darkness as a space of possibility in which unknowing is not only unavoidable but necessary. This is a profoundly ecological position, and so it is no surprise that he refers to ecocritical theorist Timothy Morton’s concept of the ‘hyperobject’ to characterise technological networks. Environmentalists have long understood that we live in a lighted clearing surrounded by a much greater, denser, darker mass of planetary life. The sunny optimism of ‘bright green’ environmentalism, with its faith in technological solutions, is frequently criticised. This is an ecological critique of light, in which the public world of politics (what Arendt describes as a ‘space of appearances’) is decentred by an appeal to something fundamentally withdrawn from the lumen naturale of human reason. The chromatics or shades of ecopolitics, ranging from dark to bright, suggest degrees of commitment to this position.

INTRODUCTION

Over the past decade, research on the role of infrastructure in societal transformation has blossomed, labelled as the “infrastructural turn” in social sciences (Amin 2014). Increasingly, the focus is not limited to large technical systems that facilitate resource and energy flows such as (rail) roads, ports and power lines, but also encompasses cultural institutions such as public libraries and museums. Libraries are long-acknowledged places for information provision and knowledge transmission, but they increasingly also function as important socio-cultural infrastructure that contributes to the everyday life of cities (Klinenberg 2018; Latham & Layton 2019). Arguably, this transition of libraries from information to socio-cultural infrastructure is generative to society, but it is also what is necessary for libraries as a public institution to avoid extinction (Van Melik & Merry 2021). Shrinking subsidies, changing demographics, decreasing membership and the rise of digital technologies force libraries to reinvent themselves: as community centres, innovation labs and makerspaces.

This transition has changed the “hardware” of libraries, which now offer fewer physical books and more mobile usages of library space. A library's furniture needs to be flexible to allow for rapid spatial reorganization to accommodate a wide range of non-book-based services, including art classes, homework, social service assistance, language instruction, crafts and yoga classes. But more fundamentally, this transition also requires a change in libraries’ “software”, reframing the librarian's role from “information experts to community advocates, teachers, and as match-makers for people to meet one another and new ideas” (Barniskis 2016: 114). Community librarian courses are organized to equip staff for these new duties, like arranging lunch meetings for elderly patrons. Turning the library into socio-cultural infrastructure not only requires staff to increasingly perform “emotional labour” (Julien & Genuis 2009), but also to demonstrate and legitimize the library's social values beyond its role as information provider (Van Melik & Merry 2021).

To understand the practices behind these transformations, this chapter focuses on how the library as socio-cultural infrastructure comes into being through (in)formal practices.