This chapter traces the alignment between the Victorian novel, the articulation of geological, or “deep” time, and the emergence of the Anthropocene. The Victorian era is usually understood in terms of “uniformitarian” geology, in which Earth changes slowly and gradually, an understanding that has also informed understandings of the novel in the period. By contrast, this chapter unearths a latent “catastrophism” in Victorian fiction, examining geological events and underground spaces that reconfigure the conditions of possibility in works by Charles Dickens, Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, Bram Stoker, and Thomas Hardy.

The interplay of life, form, and power is central to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s seminal essay, “Experience.” It also comes to mark his mature articulations of metaphysics and philosophy, nature and history, and politics and ethics in essays like “Power,” “Success,” or his lecture “Powers of the Mind.” Power is a key theme across Emerson’s relentlessly eclectic thinking – from the creative potentialities of the imagination and the intellect, and the deforming forces of love and loss, to the conditions that embolden individual selves to mastery, invention, and success. The impulsive, circulatory, transitory, depersonalizing, and yet aggrandizing modes of power that emerge in Emerson’s thinking – the powers of the heart and the powers of the mind – point to a vitality that not only appears as the content of his essays and lectures but is at once stylistically performed by them.

Emerson’s poetry has been somewhat of an enigma for readers and critics alike, who have often found it thematically opaque and stylistically unwieldy. Many have concluded that he was incapable of writing “better” verse, a conclusion predicated upon the assumption that he intended to do otherwise but couldn’t. This essay takes as a starting point the idea that the roughness of Emerson’s poetic style was intentional and that his metric irregularities are not accidents. After analyzing the style, rhetoric, and prosody of the poems, this essay contextualizes these elements within Emerson’s metaphysics. It argues that Emerson’s poetry reveals the crumbling of meter that led to the modernist revolution and free verse; poetic style did not suddenly jump from Longfellow to Whitman, but rather meter was stretched and strained before it was broken.

This chapter contributes to the understanding of how monuments are used to root nations in an apparently immemorial past. It looks at tales of living, or at least moving stones, especially those known as prehistoric monuments, and how these support regional or national identity, focusing on the period from the 1960s to the present. The emergence of the 'New Age' movement contributed to the growing understanding of Cornwall's prehistoric stones as Celtic and spiritual in the 1960s and 1970s. The growing environmental movement is used to endow the special abilities of the Cornish to connect with the land with a certain moral superiority over the English incomers and 'patriarchal' violators. However, James Lovelock's understanding of the living earth is opposed to nationalism. The chapter shows how some Cornish writers romanticise themselves as a primitive race, and as such as having special claims of belonging to and ownership of the land.

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts discussed in this book. The book traces a genealogy of modern nationalism through the diverse ways in which rocks are used to construct a past that is experienced as distinctly Cornish. It also traces historical development of racial and ancestral definitions of Cornishness, other ways of identifying as Cornish. The book follows the emerging perception of a primitive Cornish race in the nineteenth century, a period when scientific understandings of race became dominant explanations of human difference, and its survival in twentieth-century nationalist writing. The growing identification of the primitive rocks with the primitive Celtic race of Cornwall, depicted in folklore, travel literature and fiction, could be taken up by nationalists in the later economic conditions of underdevelopment. It became a way of claiming a territorial connection with the land from which others are excluded.

This chapter looks at the poetic herbarium through the concept of vegetal ontology, addressing works by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and especially Emily Dickinson. The epistolary herbaria is a collaborative affair; “a flower in a letter,” like the tendencies of the plants themselves, seeded itself among various writers from across national frontiers. Not only were the form and the content of the messages vegetal but so also was the act of sending, disseminating the herbarium as so many seeds or spores, preceded by lovingly tending to, gathering and preserving flowers. In her work, Dickinson restages the elemental and cosmic clash of viriditas – “greenness,” or the self-refreshing power of finite existence that reaches its apotheosis in plants – and ariditas – “dryness,” or the scorching heat of sin understood in the extra-moral sense of everything that contravenes life and its renewal. Dickinson’s approach is at the same time allegorical and literal, plants providing her with a way of dealing with the inexorability of death. Analogous practices and preferences, like genres and authors, developed across nationalities, geographies, and time periods.

Chapter 2 investigates the corrupting and corrosive effects of slavery. An association already exists between slavery and the rise of Gothic fiction through the West Indian connections of the major Gothic writers, Horace Walpole, William Beckford and Matthew Lewis. Mary Shelley’s new creation myth in Frankenstein draws not just on Prometheus and Adam but also, it will be argued, on the topical issue of the enslaved and the reluctance of many abolitionists to support the cause of immediate emancipation. Within this reading of Frankenstein as an allegory of slavery, the monster is considered as a demonised version of miscegenation and the fate of his female companion related to fears generated by rebel female slaves. Her resurrection in Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein (1935) demonstrates how surgery can be used for sexual purposes in creating a female creature, as indicated by the film title.

This chapter considers how cliffs function as a space that is almost but not quite detached from the nation, as part of the mainland of England but also semi-foreign. It looks most closely at mid-Victorian travel narrative by Wilkie Collins, Rambles Beyond Railways, and at one of his early novels, Basil. In Basil, the superstitious fishermen reappear in more sinister form, becoming the foreign kind of Gothic threat from within. Like many characters in Victorian fiction, Basil has travelled from the relative safety of civilized London to an outer, rocky wilderness that is part of Britain and yet different and dangerous. The Cornish Riviera, like Collins's Rambles and Basil, accordingly depicts experiences of travelling to the 'mysterious' edge of England, to the very boundaries of the nation, to its unstable, stormy borders, where anything might happen.

Chapter four demonstrates how Davenant’s first protectorate entertainment, The Siege of Rhodes (1656 and 1663), was revised at the Restoration as a heroic drama to make it suitable for the changing times. In chapter four, I turn to examine how the text was made fit for a Restoration audience. The chapter also addresses John Dryden’s epic ten-act The Conquest of Granada (1670 and 1671) to show how early Restoration heroic dramas appropriated and reworked ideas of kingship that had circulated over the previous twenty years. By relocating war and usurpation to another land, these plays endeavour to create a neutral territory through which to question notions of sovereignty. Yet the brief fashion for heroic drama was not without its critics: a response to The Conquest of Granada, but also to the brief fashion for heroic drama, the Duke of Buckingham’s burlesque of the heroic genre, The Rehearsal (1672), brings questions of governance back to England through figuring the trials and tribulations of the two kings of Brentford.

This chapter traces the poetological and literary-historical dimension of arrogance in Geoffrey Chaucer's and William Shakespeare's treatments of the story of Troilus and Criseyde/Cressida. It situates arrogance within recent discussions of authorship, starting with Patrick Cheney's work on the deeply embedded bid to literary fame in Shakespeare's works, his counter-authorship. In Chaucer's Troilus, a poetics of arrogance emerges as the basis for alternative articulations of literary authorship, developed in the interplay between the Poet and 'his' Criseyde. Shakespeare's Troilus, however, inverts the Chaucerian conception of authorship: Cressidan humility is displaced as authorial arrogance. By Shakespeare's time, arrogant performances had become cornerstones of courtly self-presentation, associated with the Inns of Court where Troilus might have first been staged. The binary of medieval Trojans and Renaissance Greeks seem to organize the opposition of humble Trojan poets and supercilious Greek playwrights.