This chapter engages most closely with the novels and poetry of Jack Clemo. His contrasting view of the landscape is partly due to his own family's involvement in the clay industry and the fact that he lived most of his life in the area. Clemo was writing from the 1930s to the 1980s, when the clay industry was still active and the local environment in flux, however, so this is a constantly changing rather than a fixed, timeless landscape. In contrast to the sense of granite as having a supernatural timelessness, Clemo senses the moving, ever-changing, fragile landscape as spiritual. The chapter explores a more ambivalent view of Celtic Cornwall and Celticity, and finally Clemo's outright rejection of it, and his desire for escape and freedom. As well as rejecting Celtic nationalism and traditional folktales, Clemo develops an alternative to the upper class industrial romance.

Chapter two explores a selection of play pamphlets and how the paper stage was used to present images of Charles I and Oliver Cromwell. While the regicide silenced some of the criticism levied against Charles, Cromwell was increasingly portrayed as a Machiavellian: the saint and martyred king met his polar opposite in the portrayal of a demonic lord protector. Parliamentarians and royalists used drama as a way of reflecting upon and responding to politics. Through examining play pamphlets that use the place of the fair or the afterlife as a way to respond to the protectorate, this chapter shows that these play pamphlets are not uniform in their depictions of Charles or Cromwell, but share and modify modes of attack and defence on the page.

The Victorians carried a powerful sense of British environmental norms and values into the lands they colonized. Literature from the settler colonies of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand testifies to those inherited expectations and their collision with unfamiliar local conditions, while also gesturing (if only implicitly) to Indigenous environmental knowledges. Despite often being dismissed by later critics as derivative or inauthentic, such works played a prominent role in mediating diverse conceptions of the environment within an imperial system otherwise keyed towards its transformation and exploitation. Writing about forests in New Zealand highlights literature’s capacity to articulate and assess diverse conceptions of environmental value. Accounts of aridity and drought in Australia demonstrate the role played by literature in comprehending unfamiliar and unpredictable climates. The poetry of Mohawk and Canadian author E. Pauline Johnson points to the need for non-Indigenous critics to become more cognizant of literary expressions of Indigenous environmental knowledge.

Chapter 5 compares two novels that portray the self as a multi-scalar collective. Reading David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks (2014) alongside Greg Bear’s Darwin’s Radio (1999), I show that both novels represent the self as a space of cohabitation and co-evolution, where symbiotic relations embed the temporality of human characters within other timescales. I read these plots as symbiopolitical experiments that question the ‘dis-embedding’ of life performed by biocapitalism. Because it resists the separation of self from non-self, the symbiotic subject destabilises the type of immunological politics theorised by Roberto Esposito and Frédéric Neyrat, where fantasies of biological and social immunity are built upon defensive boundaries. In these novels, such immunitary fantasies are undermined by metaleptic poetics, where the self is both co-written by others within and forced to position itself within the narrative of its own species. These strange loops open up the narrative of the self to the necessity of symbiopolitical relations.

This chapter provides approaches to reading Pater’s works for their remarkable literary style, with particular attention to his essay on ‘Style’ (1889) and passages from works including ‘The Child in the House’ (1878) and the Conclusion to Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873). It begins by illustrating how Pater’s creation of atmospheres is intrinsic to his style as, to borrow his phrase, ‘a literary artist’. This style was focal in criticism of his works from very first reviews of The Renaissance. It identifies and analyses his characteristic vocabulary and its sensory effects, discussing Pater’s endeavours to locate the subjective origins of writing style in his essays before turning to analyse the unconventional phrasing that defined his sentences.

This chapter argues that the discussion of pollution in Victorian environmental writing was often cross-wired with an oppressive and dehumanizing moral rhetoric. The confusion of the moral and material valences of words like “pollution,” “impurity,” “contamination,” and “filth” meant that, in practice, the very persons and communities that were suffering the most at the hands of extractive capitalism were imagined to be the cause of environmental breakdown, rather than its most grievously suffering casualties. In this way, the profound human cost of industrialism and the profit logic could be obscured under a victim-blaming rhetoric of social respectability, sexual purity, and moral righteousness. Drawing on key passages by Henry Mayhew, Charles Dickens, Friedrich Engels, John Ruskin, Robert Browning, and Arthur Conan Doyle, the chapter shows some of the ways in which this troubling conflation of the moral and material was both critiqued and reinforced in the literature of the period.

After sketching two indicative moments from Emerson’s 1867 westward lecturing trip – his visit to the Santee Sioux in Minnesota and his visit to a group of Hegelian philosophers in St. Louis – this Introduction to the New Cambridge Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson gives an overview of the volume contributors’ main thematic emphases. These are Emerson in relation to his contemporary moment; his religious and spiritual development; transatlantic Romanticism; nature, the environment, and climate; ethics and self-reliance; political resistance and slavery; race, US imperialism, and Asia; aesthetics, poetry, philosophy, and experimentalism; and his late style and legacy. While many readers of Emerson are most familiar with the iconic picture of him as the Sage of Concord, this introduction paints a picture of a transitional and transnational Emerson who tirelessly lectured across the United States throughout his lifetime, who can be placed in his contemporaneous transatlantic currents of Romantic literature, religion, philosophy, or science, and who nonetheless looks forward to modernist poetic, aesthetic, or musical innovations.

This chapter explores the category of the “EcoGothic” that has emerged out of the attempt by Gothic Studies to confront the reality of the climate crisis and ideas of the Anthropocene. The Gothic is often presented as a privileged mode, given its interest in affective states of fear and horror and its ability to operate at different scales from domestic realism. It can evoke apocalypse and planetary transformations, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to John Ruskin’s late lectures on storm clouds. The chapter proposes the EcoGothic be considered less as a set of objects or texts than a method of apprehension of many kinds of Victorian cultural objects. Authors discussed include Edmund Burke, Anne Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, Charles Lyell, Charles Darwin, H. G. Wells, Robert Louis Stevenson, M. P. Shiel, H. P. Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood, and others.

This chapter focuses on race in Pater’s works, contextualising these within the racial politics of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western aesthetic discourse, especially in the work of two of Pater’s major intellectual influences, the art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, and the philosopher Immanuel Kant, who profoundly shaped the cultural context of discussions of art and beauty in the West. It analyses how Pater’s writings on classical Greek sculptures and the ancient Greek god Apollo responded to this earlier cultural history, focusing on his early essay “Winckelmann” (1873) and his later short story “Apollo in Picardy” (1893). The final section examines “A Study of Dionysus” (1876) and “Denys l’Auxerrois” (1886), works where Pater portrays the wine-god, traditionally depicted as the embodiment of Oriental excess, violence, and irrationality, in a manner that affirms marginalised forms of knowledge and ways of perceiving the world associated with “Orientalised” racial groups.

This chapter argues that to truly understand Emerson, we need to see and hear him at the lectern. It sketches Emerson’s place within the performance culture and popular lecture circuit of antebellum America and contends that we should regard his works as a form of “voiced essay.” The chapter brings to life Emerson’s dramatic, modulated style as a performer of his own work, showing how his writing simulates these spoken elements at the levels of both style and theme, and inviting readers to become active listeners. The “voiced essay” ultimately dissolves strict boundaries between orality and writing, energizing a new form of social engagement. By encouraging readers to hear Emerson as a figure with a strikingly modern grasp of media forms and the synergy between orality and textuality, the chapter underscores Emerson’s ongoing relevance to debates about performance, intellectual virality, authority, and the transmission of ideas.

This chapter considers the place of democracy in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. By conceptualizing democracy, in pragmatist fashion, as a “way of life,” Emerson can be shown to have engaged democracy throughout his career in several different dimensions, both within and beyond official, state, or legal power relations. While Emerson participated in a discourse that was skeptical of the social dynamics of democracy in mass society, he simultaneously upheld his commitment to a philosophy of history that recognized in what he called “the democratic element” a driving force toward greater justice and equality. Democracy furthermore provided the key through which Emerson interpreted his own practice and poetics as a freelance lecturer. Emerson’s commitment to a transcendentally conceived notion of justice at times came into conflict with democracy’s requirements of negotiation and compromise, particularly in the context of radical abolitionism and the Civil War. As this chapter argues, Emerson tirelessly strove to resolve this conflict.

When discussing Asian religion, art, and philosophy, Emerson generally bestows praise and tends toward cosmopolitan, universalist sentiments. Old Asian ideas, especially from Persian, Indian, and Chinese traditions, reinforced his Transcendentalist sense of morality and, especially, his belief in “the infinitude of the private man.” In the contexts of geography and history, however, he gravitates toward nationalist, imperialist, and racist views. Here he betrays his vulnerability to some of the ruling ideas of geographical determinism and teleological historicism informing the ideology of manifest destiny. Yet, true to form for a writer who so famously abjured consistency, this basic distinction does not always hold. This chapter thus begins with an examination of Emerson’s discrepant Asias before analyzing how, despite this general dichotomy, he was sometimes able to subvert prevailing tendencies and introduce uncommon subtleties to his representation of Asia, its cultures, and its peoples.

Poetry and poethood have long been intertwined with floral imagery starting with the ancient Greek idea of poems as flowers (anthoi), with the anthology (anthologia), the garland (stephanos), and, later the florilegium, being a gathering or collection of poets’ or writers’ finest flowers. Victorian poetry is an efflorescence of such ideas, its book titles frequently designating verse collections by one or more poets as a sheaf, posy, bouquet, nosegay, or as an idyllic garden retreat. Botanical images and metaphors of seeds, flowers, leaves, and shoots regularly occur as markers of the poet’s vocation, especially in prefatory poems and poetic dedications, while the lyric poem is often identified as a flower and a floral gift. Drawing on a large range of poetic examples, this chapter includes discussion of poems by Alfred Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett-Browning, Mark André Raffalovich, Thomas Hardy, Eugene Lee-Hamilton, A. E. Housman, and Michael Field.

This chapter accounts for Emerson’s complex, and sometimes seemingly contradictory, relationship to religion and religious experience. While Emerson definitively left the Christian ministry in the early 1830s – turning his back on eight generations of his forefathers who had all become ministers – he never abandoned a profound interest in broader forms of spirituality, including those outside the pale of Christendom. If reason and faith were to be found “in the woods” (and not the church), as his inaugural debut Nature (1836) provocatively claimed, some critics have read Emerson as a secularist (or at the very least a naturalist), epitomizing larger dynamics of nineteenth-century dis- and re-enchantment. This chapter aims for a more nuanced (and multi-hued) view, arguing that Emerson believed the “spiritual laws” of the cosmos could be explained by the twinned activities of science and poetics as forms of social praxis, a communal making of beauty and truth.

The Introduction observes that a significant strand of twenty-first-century fiction is attempting to connect the human to other-than-human scales. I suggest that this fiction performs epistemic and ethical work because it foregrounds relations of biological and ecological interdependence. I situate my study in the context of scale theory and outline the eco-political and symbiopolitical stakes of scalar rhetoric. I then highlight the different ways in which multi-scalar poetics stimulate ontological and ethical questioning, produce new conceptions of self, agency, and environment, and ultimately enable ecological response-ability. Scale-switching, I argue, is not only a significant writing practice but a necessary reading methodology. I then introduce the three main devices analysed in the book: critical synecdoche, ontological metalepsis, and scalar irony.