With today’s global media attention on climate crises and resource-centered violence, scholars are keenly invested in understanding how we have reached such a dire situation and what it is that has kept us from acting effectively to improve it. With Britain one of the first among the most powerful, assertive, and technologically advanced nations to develop a culture relying on self-worth defined by bourgeois affluence, the Victorian era marks the crucial historical period from which arose our current inability to act decisively as a collective in the face of global environmental destruction. But it also began the first local environmentalist groups, offered literature directly contesting environmental degradation, and created legal legislation regarding the rights of nonhuman animals. Meanwhile, as demonstrated by Indigenous author Kahgegagahbowh (aka George Copway), from the colony of Upper Canada, many who did not identify as British contributed to the shaping of the Victorian Age and its ecological zeitgeist.

William Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida occupies an intermediate position, in its belated appearance in the Folio between Henry VIII and Coriolanus: between 'history' and 'tragedy', and in its title between two 'tragedies', Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra. In Geoffrey Chaucer's poem, one of the acknowledged 'sources' of Shakespeare's play, the 'interiority of the subjects' is preserved, with emphasis upon the lovers' 'feelings'. E. Talbot Donaldson's intelligent view of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde is that of 'a portrait of a woman of almost mythological femininity, and readers respond to such a portrait by becoming their own mythmakers'. Criseyde's infidelity is a consequence of her inscription in a symbolic order that commits her to weakness in the face of masculine power. For Cressida, that 'madness of discourse' has always been a possibility, a protection against the power vested in patriarchy.

Before his rehabilitation got under way in the late 1970s, had Emerson really been the object of “repression” by the American philosophical establishment? The validity of the historical claim put forward by Stanley Cavell has always seemed doubtful. In point of fact, Emerson turns out to have, from his day to ours, a largely unbroken chain of legitimate heirs among American philosophers. This chapter, which builds on previous scholarly efforts to correct and complete the record, notably by historians of pragmatism, continues the work of recovering the Emersonian legacy in American philosophy. The multiform nature of that legacy, which extends to pedagogical theory and classroom practice in American schools, raises important questions for historiographers as they deal with changes in cultural and institutional reception over time. Of particular importance is the question raised by Cavell’s own contribution to Emerson studies: what is philosophy’s relation to the broader literary culture?

This chapter argues that William Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida participates in a set of traditions with a long history of fierce internal hostility. It outlines some alignments of that prior history and focuses on Shakespeare's contribution to a tradition of literary defacement. The defacements, of both Hecuba and Sinon, evoke in the late medieval British Troy tradition, that of Robert Henryson, who brutally closes down Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. Shakespeare draws primarily on the sceptical, late medieval ephemera tradition and in particular its vernacular English and Scots examples. The chapter distinguishes the competing traditions of the Trojan War available to Shakespeare: Homer's Iliad; Virgil's Aeneid; Ovid's Heroides, letter 7 and its tradition; and the Galfridian tradition, derived from Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae. The sceptical ephemera tradition is resolutely anti-Homeric, anti-Virgilian and anti-Galfridian.

This chapter considers Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and William Morris’s New from Nowhere (1890) through the lens of the commons and what counts as “common sense.” Taking its cue from a question Morris poses about art’s role in radical social transformation, the chapter asks if the recent environmental turn in Victorian studies is interested in piecemeal or systemic change. Considering both modes of change, the chapter proposes a “poetry of the commons,” grounded in Carroll’s and Morris’s very different approaches to both the commons and common sense, as an alternative to the market economy and as more accurate approximation of how the commons traditionally worked. Accordingly, Alice and News can be seen as laying the foundations for something like “commons sense” and a practice and poetry of the commons adequate to the demands of the climate crisis.

In Troilus and Cressida, the major characters revel in all kinds of received wisdom, commonplaces and topical truths. While Cressida chooses to dissemble her passion in a Petrarchan manner, Troilus has already abandoned the dimension of courtliness. The principal actors in the interplay between the faculties of the mind are perception, imagination, memory, reason and passion. In the models current in William Shakespeare's time, imagination, memory and reason reside in different chambers or ventricles of the mind, which are not hermetically sealed against each other. Ulysses' attempts to validate Stoic magnanimity crashes, the cognitive therapy of pride failing to affect the patient's imagination. Stoicism may be a philosophy of coherence, of living in accordance with oneself of the good flow of life, but it is all this by virtue of its also being a philosophy of self-mastery.

Chapter 1 maps out the theoretical and cultural context for the early twenty-first century’s multi-scalar view of life. Progressing from the microscopic scale to the planetary perspective, I present the recent shifts in microbiology, biomedicine, anthropology, and Earth system science that are shaping our awareness of interdependence between living processes. In each domain, I draw attention to the narrative and rhetorical aspects of these epistemological shifts. This overview leads me to discuss some of the theoretical terminology frequently used to conceptualise interdependence across scales, and the different models of life brought into play by the terms process, network, assemblage, and meshwork. The final section outlines the scalar rhetoric and tropes of early twenty-first-century popular science. Here I examine the relation between trans-scalar rhetoric, which emphasises the necessity of thinking across scales, and multi-scalar tropes, which substitute one scale of life for another. From a scale-critical perspective, I examine the epistemological tensions at work in those tropes.

Emerson’s aesthetics addresses fundamental philosophical questions on the reality of beauty, experience, and the nature of art and creativity. A central thread running throughout his aesthetic views is the love of beauty, which celebrates a felt appreciation for the diverse beauties found in nature and society in and for themselves. The experiential self as it exists in a connatural relationship with its surroundings has the potential to enjoy such deep folds of qualitative significance. Emerson, moreover, theorizes the existence of an absolute form of beauty having a metaphysical primacy. Beauty exists as the ultimate ideal of human conduct and thought and as the primordial ground or first cause of the universe. In this aesthetic cosmology, art through its imaginative symbolic appropriations of its environment shares in the greater metamorphic processes of a creatively polyphonous and open universe.

This chapter considers Pater’s public persona. It addresses how his position as a university academic, public lecturer and intellectual, and subject of (mis)representation in parodies such as The New Republic by W. H. Mallock, shaped his life and reputation. It places the evolution of Pater’s public life in the context of late-Victorian culture and society, including attention to Oxford’s secularisation and curriculum changes, journalistic practices, and career setbacks. In doing so, this chapter shows Pater’s ambition as an intellectual and how this shaped his career and writing.

This chapter argues that the origins of the Capitalocene, which locates the roots of planetary crisis in capitalistic accumulation and exploitation, can be found in the nineteenth century. The Victorian period not only witnessed the rise of fossil-fueled modernity – an acceleration of global industrialization fueled by coal and colonialism – but also produced searing critiques of capitalism in some of its most enduring literature. Central to my analysis is Olive Schreiner’s Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland (1897), a fictional admonition of Cecil Rhodes and his British South African Company. This chapter reads Trooper Peter alongside The Story of an African Farm (1883) and From Man to Man (1926) to illuminate Schreiner’s critique of colonial capitalism and Rhodes’s expansionism. Schreiner rebukes capitalism’s frontier process and challenges hierarchical constructions of nature and humanity, exposing capitalism’s normalization of racial and sexual exploitation, while also imagining alternative modes of more-than-human solidarity.

This chapter explores Emerson’s lifelong ambivalence about the development of new scientific disciplines and the goals of empirical research. Beginning with his famous epiphany at the Paris Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle in 1833, Emerson’s writing career reflects both intense fascination with and wariness about the trajectories of professional science. With obvious enthusiasm, he tracked developments in astronomy, chemistry, comparative anatomy, embryology, entomology, geology, hydraulics, optics, meteorology, molecular physics, physiology, and zoology. But Emerson’s insistence that empirical observation should align with philosophical intuition, for instance, also generates critiques of the pragmatic instrumentalism and gradual pace with which those emerging fields assembled accretive models of the physical world. Tracing this tension in his thought, driven by an effort to unify increasingly disparate modes of empirical inquiry, reveals Emerson’s unsettled negotiation with the transformative potential he finds in modern science.

Hope and fear are the emotions that are lending themselves most easily to a metadramatic reading of Troilus and Cressida because they highlight the fact that the play draws on a well-known story. This chapter argues that, by emphasizing Troilus's and Cressida's hopes and fears, William Shakespeare sets in motion a triangle of narrative, emotion and temporality. It discusses the relationship between hope, fear and future as exhibited by the play. The play thus manages to pursue an aesthetic double strategy of movere and of initiating a conscious discourse on historicity. The chapter explores how Shakespeare uses this relation in an aesthetic strategy that seeks to unhinge the idea that a play is incapable of transcending a point of view defined by its historical situation. Literary works such as Ovid's Metamorphoses or Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde provide models for emotions such as hope and fear.