Did Victorian literature prompt political change? This chapter examines Thomas Hood’s “Song of the Shirt” and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Cry of the Children,” both credited with bringing mass awareness to exploitative labor. But what part did they play in actually changing Victorian society? Levine argues that a single work of art, then as now, does not accomplish change unless it takes part in campaigns that are organized around three social forms: large shows of public support, sustained pressure over time, and specific, well-articulated goals. Analyzing the relations between literary and activist forms not only throws light on Victorian culture but can also help literary scholars now to engage in effective political and social struggle.

In chapter 4, the vampire theme continues with a discussion of Dracula, Jewishness and blood. It will be argued that the early film version of Stoker’s novel, Nosferatu, encrypts the ostensibly dangerous vampire body as a metaphor for the crypto-Jew. This approach informs the interpretation of E. Elias Merhige’s Shadow of the Vampire (2000) on the making of Nosferatu, which vampirises the earlier film. Besides looking back to the anti-Semitic imagery of Nosferatu, the film projects forward to the Jewish genocide perpetrated by fascist Germany, signified in a scene by a single swastika. This is an illustration of Jacques Derrida’s hauntology, which paradoxically predicts the spectre, a thing of the past, returning in the future. Both films contribute to a consideration of whether Nazi anti-Jewish films vampirically fed off the Gothic cinema of Weimar Germany

This chapter probes the relation between realism and the georgic in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. The georgic is generally not associated with that period, and realism was allegedly on the decline. Yet, in focusing on an agricultural setting in rural Bengal, Lal Behari Day’s novel Govinda Samanta, or Bengal Peasant Life (1874) vivifies the connection between the two in ways that enhance both our understanding of the modes of colonial critique as well as the dispersed evolution of literary genres.

This chapter traces an ongoing engagement with primitive landscapes, which were becoming increasingly important to a post-industrial tourist economy. It demonstrates the significance of Robert Hunt as a geologist-poet, who, like Humphry Davy, engaged with mining and landscapes, but has as yet received almost no critical attention. Geology and folklore were considered to be comparable occupations; the search for fossilised animals runs parallel to the quest for ancient human traditions. The chapter considers how the geological primitivism develops over the course of the nineteenth century, unearthing a growing association between rocks and race. It illustrates how particular rocks serve to distinguish 'Celtic' regions and nations from a more 'sedimentary' England, and distinguishes the 'Celtic race' from the more 'civilised' English. The chapter discusses how the two aspects of granite, the modern industrial and the primitive, simultaneously feed into conceptions of Cornwall as part of Britain, yet separable from England.

David LaRocca’s chapter resituates Emerson’s 1856 book English Traits within Emerson’s transatlanticism, as well as within his intellectual, cultural, and historical moment. In particular, it analyzes and contextualizes Emerson’s comments on race in English Traits in relation to the formation of British and American national mythologies. As LaRocca argues, in contrast to less generous critics, Emerson is indeed egalitarian, his philosophy of the fluidity of identity brings him to a stance against definite identity distinctions, and English Traits does not praise Saxon whiteness but poetico-sociologically investigates the nation of England. What is more, Emerson’s interest was, in part, personal. He made English Traits a public statement that justified questions about his family tree and, in a larger domain, the way that New England was formed and informed by England, even while he pursued a broader view of human history – of whatever vintage – as inseparable from natural history.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book treats the emotions in Troilus and Criseyde/Cressida as metatheatrical operators and, as a consequence, as more general metatemporal moderators. It suggests that hope and fear are central in William Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida because the two protagonists are aware of the way their reputations are being forged for eternity. The book scrutinizes a transhistorical regime of conflict-ridden affect. It also suggests that Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida situates itself within an affective temporality which is explicitly textualized. The book traces the genealogy of arrogance from one of the typified sins through to its development into an affective marker of novelty and innovation, finally being configured around the notion of authorship. The book explores the poetological dimension of arrogance in Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida.

This chapter looks at nineteenth-century visual arts with an ecological eye. The first section considers distance: the air, haze, clouds, and atmosphere in a painting. Next, closely observed detail in images, often influenced by John Ruskin’s beliefs, is related to the importance of close attentiveness, as well as to the global networks in the study and transport of plants. It then considers the use of visual material in publicizing environmental harms and in bringing home their emotional impact, as well as considering the long-term, as yet invisible effects of climate change on landscapes. Finally, it looks at the role of visual art in providing aesthetic escapism, whatever the realities of pollution and urbanization, as with James McNeill Whistler’s misty Thames views, or with nostalgic pastoral. All sections ask what environmental futures these images contain. The chapter highlights four images: John Constable’s View on the Stour Near Dedham (1823); Albert Goodwin’s A Sunset in the Manufacturing Districts (1884); Henry Warren, The Black Country Near Bilston (1869); and George Vicat Cole, At Arundel, Sussex (1887).

Ethics, for Emerson, begins in perceiving the “wonderful congruity which subsists between man and the world” such that ethics, in thinking and in living, is a matter of being “allied to all.” In this view, the “infinitude of the private man” – often yoked to the concept of “self-reliance” – names a metaphysical and ontological fact at the heart of Emerson’s ethics: human existence within a web of interconnections. This chapter draws widely from Emerson’s oeuvre to show how he unites “severe science with a poetic vision,” seeing and seeking to express how “Our life is consentaneous and far-related.” His work teaches us to see kinships between ethics, aesthetics, religion, science, and politics, and to consider ethics a practice of observing the intimacies in which we exist and in which the ethical question “How shall I live?” begins living in us.

Chapter one examines how drama was enacted in textual form upon the paper stage, outlining how writers used the medium of print to appropriate pre-civil war drama as a way to comment upon contemporary anxieties regarding war and the closure of the playhouses. Informed by recent discussions regarding the formation of the nascent public sphere, it offers a reappraisal of the Habermassian public sphere, presenting a more fluid form of public-making and making the case for the importance of story telling as a way to enter the public realm. The chapter also discusses how drama operates and participates in the public sphere to enact political grievances through an examination of woodcuts that accompany three play pamphlets that were printed in the mid-seventeenth century.