This chapter focuses on fictions from the 1920s to the mid-twentieth century, which depict rocks as containing a ghostly kind of life. Such ghostliness can be threatening to visitors who attempt to possess property that turns out to be haunted by previous inhabitants, as in gothic fiction by L. T. C. Rolt and E. F. Benson. The chapter explores the ongoing perception of Cornwall's ghostly inhabitants as foreign and savage. It considers a sense of the uncanny that is to some extent particular to how visitors have perceived Cornwall as part of England but also as foreign; as home but also as belonging to strangers. Wilkie Collins and Benson to some extent depict Cornwall as a place of danger and hostile natives. D. H. Lawrence for his thinly disguised memoir, Kangaroo, drew most heavily on his personal experiences of feeling unwelcome, involving his perception of stones of sacrifice.

Chapter 2 compares three narratives that construe landscapes as multi-scalar relational fields. In Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004), Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes (1999), and A. S. Byatt’s ‘A Stone Woman’ (2003), environments are cast not as settings but as living actors of the story. I read these poetics through anthropologist Tim Ingold’s conceptualisation of landscape as a meshwork of entangled lines of life, to suggest that these fictions turn landscapes into mediators connecting human with ecosystemic scales, and biological temporality with ‘geostory’. My analysis focuses on the recurring trope of the microcosm, which allows fiction to explore large-scale ecological disruption through smaller organisms and environments. The microcosm, I argue, is a figure in tension, which acts here simultaneously as a trans-scalar viewing instrument and as a disruptor of relations between scales. I read this trope as a critical tool of ecological awareness because it foregrounds and questions scalar collapse – the epistemic projection of one scale onto another.

This chapter argues that large-scale biological and energy systems were an important environmental concept in Victorian literature. It traces two intertwined cultural narratives. On the one hand, the transition to a fossil energy economy raised fears of coal exhaustion that were echoed by narratives of entropy: In both geology and the thermodynamic physical sciences it was proposed that the eventual exhaustion of energy sources would lead to the end of civilization or even human life. On the other hand, narratives of biological degeneration and atavism arose from a certain interpretation of evolutionary theory; some writers claimed to see unhealthy symptoms of species decline in “degenerate” artists and criminals. We can see how these cultural narratives functioned as environmental concepts in Victorian literary genres of science fiction and decadence, through texts such as H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.

This chapter argues that Troilus and Cressida's attempted violence upon a prototypical form of historical time is in part an attack on the literary narratives. What the play lays bare is a nefarious temporality that is simultaneously condemned and underpinned, yet ultimately eroded by the relentless literary epochality of the successive Troy narratives. The chapter suggests that the past in William Shakespeare's Trojan War drama is a literary past. Emulation, in Shakespeare's vision, is at the heart of hierarchy, maintaining and exaggerating differences, and thus generating a fundamental social energy within a warlike aristocratic society. It also suggests that it is in the way that the chivalric texts accruing to the Troy narratives and the residual early modern ethos of a mythologized medievalism are relentlessly dismantled in a process of hyper-critique. The chapter focuses on the social and temporal threat that underpinning the masculine honour.

In 1873, Sir Walter Buller published A History of the Birds of New Zealand, with a second expanded edition in 1888, both with the highly praised chromolithographic plates by J. G. Keulemans. This chapter explores the politics of extinction in colonial New Zealand through the lens of Keulemans’s ornithological illustrations and Buller’s scientific rhetoric. Buller believed that the extinction of native species was an inevitable consequence of colonization, itself an unambiguous embodiment of progress. This displacement theory of extinction was not, however, confined to the field of natural history but was frequently articulated by a range of voices in colonial New Zealand. By naturalizing colonization, displacement theory erased the agency of colonists, allowing them to justify the consequences of violent dispossession as ordained by nature and legitimizing the resulting disempowerment – if not erasure – of the Indigenous peoples of New Zealand.

The Conclusion formulates the ethical role that I attribute to multi-scalar poetics in the context of an accelerating ecological crisis. I argue that narrative fiction can enable response-ability towards multiple scales of life and scale-bound perspectives. I expand the concept of scalar irony, which I defend here as an eco-political mode of attention that fiction enables for the reader. Returning to the question of analogy, I argue against the temptation to hierarchise non-analogical tropes above analogical ones, and propose that literature’s power lies in its capacity to turn all tropes into sites of epistemic and ethical negotiation.

This chapter focuses on Pater’s two novels: Marius the Epicurean (1885) and Gaston de Latour (1888, 1896), illustrating how they stand at the heart of his work as aesthetic writer and of new currents in nineteenth-century fiction. It shows that, together, these novels aimed to provide a personal overview of European history in epochs of transition: the transition from paganism to Christianity in the case of Marius, and the Reformation for the unfinished Gaston. The chapter positions these novels in the context of their contemporary debates around the future of the novel, including attention to Henry James’s ‘The Art of Fiction’ (1884) and Emile Zola’s naturalism. The discussion then focuses on Marius as a historical novel, which interweaves history with fiction and intellectual commentary, a decadent novel engaged in the core themes of contemporary French decadence, and a cosmopolitan novel engaged in acts of translation from Latin to English.

This chapter focuses on Pater’s unstable and evolving view of Christianity. It discusses the significance of his failed attempts to be ordained into the Church of England, his rejection of religious and moral dogmatism, disavowal of spiritual after life, and paganism. Although these aspects have led critics to disregard Pater’s investment in the Church, this chapter illustrates the sensuous appeal of religious practice and how Pater valued religion for its truth-content, even if he was at different stages in his life very uncertain about what that might mean. Putting his attitude to religion in a wide-ranging context, including the works of William James, John Ruskin, and John Henry Newman, it explores the appearance of ritual, religious symbolism, and belief in works including ‘Emerald Uthwart’, ‘Pascal’, and Marius the Epicurean.

This chapter discusses Pater’s relationship with the aesthetic movement and its central principle of ‘art for art’s sake’, suggesting that he provided a philosophical basis for some key assumptions of the movement, spontaneously practised but not theorised before him. It illustrates how Pater’s first articulation of ‘art for art’s sake’ responds to the burgeoning aesthetic movement illustrated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s painting, the art furniture industry led by William Morris from the 1860s, and Algernon Charles Swinburne’s poetry, and in sharp response to the purism of John Ruskin. It goes on to trace the history of aestheticism back to philosophers including Immanuel Kant and the poet John Keats, and illustrates Pater’s understanding of this history via close reading of his essays including ‘Coleridge’ (1866) and ‘The School of Giorgione’ (1877), with attention to the controversies around the movement, and Pater’s involvement.

Emerson’s thought, from his early essay Nature to his late lectures on atomic physics, reveals the contradictory complexities of the Western concept of “nature,” which indexes both the outer world external to the human self, or “soul,” and the essence of our own human “nature.” Emerson’s thought thus reveals the deeper drama of American modernity, which refuses continuities between human and natural history to protect the divinity of the all-empowering human mind from its embedding in social and ecological relations. Emerson’s salvation lies in the realm of aesthetics, which responded to modernity’s iconoclastic destruction of nature by resurrecting the beauty of nature in art, reanimating in a quarantined zone all that modernity destroys. Today, when “nature” – now including anthropogenic climate change – no longer reassures us of our divinity but precipitates an existential crisis, it becomes increasingly difficult to read Emerson as our contemporary, even as his work discloses the sources of our predicament.

This chapter examines literary representations of changes in agriculture across the nineteenth century. Beginning with an overview of British farming in the early 1800s, it maps the rise of what Greg Garrard has termed “rural capitalism.” With reference to writers, including Richard Jefferies and Thomas Hardy, the piece examines how realist writing represented shifts in domestic agriculture. Moving to focus on Australia, while drawing on the work of the novelists Louisa Atkinson and Anthony Trollope, the chapter goes on to discuss Britain’s growing dependency on its colonies to provide a stable food supply. It addresses how Atkinson and Trollope were among those writers who captured the devastating changes that agriculture wreaked upon the landscape and climate, along with their warnings about the transposition of European farming methods to a radically different climate.