How did Victorian authors conceive of the rise of an extraction-based society? This chapter looks to the literary archive for early impressions of industrial mining’s wider social significance. Thanks to the new role of fossil fuels in nineteenth-century industry, the Victorian period saw a massive acceleration of mining in terms of the depths plumbed and volumes extracted. Mining operations in Britain and overseas were becoming a source of wide public attention at this time as the economy and culture shifted toward those of an extraction-based society, one grounded in the extraction of finite underground materials. This chapter explores the depiction of extraction in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s 1843 protest poem “The Cry of the Children,” Joseph Skipsey’s 1878 poem “Mother Wept,” Charles Dickens’s 1861 novel Great Expectations, and William Jevons’s 1865 study The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal-Mines.

Across the nineteenth century, from Lord Byron to Rudyard Kipling, the dominant blue ecology conceived of the ocean as infinite, unfathomable, and thus impervious to human activity. Humans could not threaten it; rather, it threatened them – a relation Charlotte Brontë, Joseph Conrad, and Robert Louis Stevenson emblematized with the figure of shipwreck. As Thomas Henry Huxley, George Henry Lewes, and other scientists disseminated their discoveries about the marine environment, however, its imagined unknowability and indestructability were put into question. Herman Melville documented the extractive enterprise of whaling; Philip Henry Gosse mourned tidepools ravaged by day trippers with a penchant for natural history. Writing about the tidal reaches of the River Thames, Charles Dickens and Henry Mayhew documented two-way traffic between land and water, human and ocean. A new understanding took shape that, in its depiction of the ocean as both affected by and affecting humanity, anticipates our own blue ecology.

This chapter addresses Pater’s vexed relationship with the decadent movement. It asks whether Pater is a decadent writer and considers the extent to which he illustrates, is appropriated into, and resists decadence. It is organised in three sections: (1) setting out the origins and definitions of decadence, with examples from mid-nineteenth century France; (2) explaining how Pater’s Conclusion to Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) picked up on key features of French decadence and the ways in which the similarities were exploited by Oscar Wilde and Arthur Symons; (3) addressing how decadence figures in Pater’s later works as an ethical problem, with reference to Marius the Epicurean (1885).

This chapter examines the representation of the common tree rhododendron in two nineteenth-century collections of botanical illustrations. The first is an engraving from Exotic Flora (1823–7), a book series compiled by English botanist William Jackson Hooker. The second is a watercolor from Specimens of Flowering Plants (c. 1830s–40s), an album that was commissioned by British Captain Frederick Parr from five Indian artists in the state of Madras (Tamil Nadu). When compared with one another, these two works not only reflect the importance of images to colonial plant science, but also raise questions about the power of botanical illustration to visualize the complexities of a large environment. Placing these books into dialogue with one another allows us to reevaluate the environmental affordances of botanical illustration as a genre, while also demonstrating how emerging theories from critical plant studies can enrich our understanding of Anglo-Indian scientific exchanges in the nineteenth century.

This chapter focuses on Pater’s short fiction, which took the form, to use Pater’s phrase, of ‘imaginary portraiture’. It positions these works in the context of Pater’s evolving imaginative writing, the publishing industry, and their influence on writers including Oscar Wilde and Arthur Symons. It illustrates how this concept of the imaginary portrait appears in works and titles of other contemporary authors published, like Pater, by Macmillan. It then explores the basis of Pater’s portrait stories, each of which focuses on an individual figure, usually a young male, destined for a tragic early death and set in Europe. In doing so, it provides examples from a range of works including ‘Duke Carl of Rosenmold’ and ‘The Child in the House’.

Queer ecology studies addresses the desires and attractions that characterize relations among and eco-politics of humans and other organic elements of their environment. Scholarship in the field has predominantly addressed how the natural environment creates a space for people’s transgressions of normative erotic and sexual practices. In a bionetwork formulation, however, no pure nature can exist out there for humans or any other organisms because one is always a constituent element of an ecological web. Many Victorians addressed the issue of animal rights, including Francis Power Cobbe, Ouida, and Henry Salt. Some authors such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon and E. M. Forster evoked pastoral contexts for same-sex male intimacy while others such as Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad found adventure literature conducive to such considerations. This chapter, however, focuses on works by Walter Pater and William Sharp that address cross-species engagement as a form of aesthetic pleasure. Through philosophy and formal techniques, they engage biocentric notions of attraction and intimacy that destabilize anthropocentricism and the classificatory boundaries of the scientific and legal discourses that came to dominate the sexual and gendered landscapes.

This chapter focuses on Pater’s most famous work, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, to provide an expansive context in which to understand its significance in intellectual, literary and art history. It begins by locating it: explaining the concept behind Pater’s collection of eleven essays in terms of publication history and the periodical press, and exploring the ways in which these essays combine silent citation with originality. Its sections concentrate on: (1) how and why Pater redefines the ‘renaissance’ from the ways in which it was conceived in the nineteenth century; (2) Pater’s definition of subjective aesthetic criticism, which reverses Matthew Arnold’s critical position, with particular attention to the Preface and Conclusion; (3) the centrality of desire and passion in text; (4) Pater’s subject-positioning between the ‘Old Masters’, modernity and his reader.

A career-long project for Emerson was the attempt to understand and seize upon the historical moment, or what he often called “the present hour,” in which he lived. But Emerson’s interest in “the Times” was also, fundamentally, an interest in time. This chapter examines “Emerson’s times” in this dual sense: his abiding investments, philosophical, social, and political, in the historical present – the time of now – and in its temporalities – the time of now. Emerson’s commitment to the present as the bedrock of historical experience and the sphere of ethical action was shaped by the new conceptions of time and the new temporal experiences afforded by the technological, scientific, and political developments of his era. Thus, if the “practical question” with regard to “the times” was, as Emerson states it in “Fate,” an immediate one – “how shall I live?” – that question was complicated by the heterochronicity of the times.

We present here the historical development of English across Micronesia, as well as a brief description of the Englishes spoken in the seven nations and territories that occupy this part of the Northern Pacific Ocean: the Federated States of Micronesia, Guam, Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, Nauru, the Northern Mariana Islands and Palau. The area has a complex colonial history, with Spain, Germany, Japan, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand all implicated at different times, in different places and in different ways. The impact of English, therefore, is variable across Micronesia. We begin, therefore, by plotting a history of English across the region before presenting descriptions of the phonology, morphosyntax and lexis of the Englishes of Micronesia, balancing a focus on individual varieties, on the one hand, with an attempt at a unified account on the other, considering what the varieties share and what keeps them distinct.

What happens when we shift our critical attention away from bourgeois subjectivity and the development of the modern individual toward the land and its centrality within British realism? In readings of a diverse range of works from Cobbett’s Rural Rides and Thomas Hardy’s Wessex novels to the emigration novel and Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm, this chapter focuses on three key forms of land use, all of which undergo major transformations over the course of the long nineteenth century: the farm, the common, and the wild. From this perspective, it argues, a new narrative about the environment emerges that brings to the fore the integral relations among labor, land, and nature that Victorian literature narrates and that are very much on the agenda today as we grapple with the legacy of these changes and their ongoing consequences for the myriad political-environmental crises we now face.

This introductory chapter briefly charts Pater’s difficulties and importance as a literary theorist and philosophical thinker, with directions for thinking critically about his works and life. It is organised in three sections: (1) Pater in Context outlines how Pater’s relationship with, and writing about, the late-Victorian period is singular with the period refracted through his aestheticism; (2) Pater, ‘himself’ explains the difficulties of looking for Pater in his writings; (3) Pater Today looks at his late-twentieth century critical history and Pater studies today.

This chapter asks what it was that marked the young Pater’s philosophy out as so radical and potentially dangerous in the 1870s. It addresses how his singular attitude to referencing, originality, and artistry in philosophy put him at odds with his contemporaries at Oxford. In its sections, it addresses (1) Pater’s reading of philosophy, and the importance of this reading to his intellectual development; (2) the ways in which Pater’s treatment of philosophy is part of his wider commitment to interdisciplinarity, and how his engagements with philosophers and their ideas shape diverse and perhaps unexpected aspects of his writings; and (3) the philosophical significance of Pater’s own aestheticism.

Sri Lankan English is a postcolonial English in South Asia with its origins dating back to the end of the eighteenth century. Its evolution is reflected in a plethora of unique English-language structures and distinct quantitative preferences. Against the background of its historical development, this chapter provides an overview of the local features of Sri Lankan English in its sound system, lexis, syntax and semantics, but also points out that Sri Lankan English features traces of pragmatic nativisation. The documentation of the structural and pragmatic emancipation of Sri Lankan English from its historical input variety of British English is framed by sociolinguistic findings about speaker groups and domains associated with English as well as about attitudes towards different varieties of English. Together with a global account of Sri Lankan English from both formal and sociolinguistic perspectives, this chapter considers potential epicentral constellations among South Asian Englishes.

The current chapter provides a historical sociolinguistic overview of English in Zimbabwe. It challenges anachronistic descriptive taxonomies that in colonial times aligned ‘L1 English’ with the variety spoken by white English-speaking monolinguals and ‘L2 English’ with black multilinguals for whom English might be a second, third or even fourth spoken language and stereotypically, assumed to be marked by pronunciation and grammatical features from the background language(s). This chapter describes varieties of English in the Zimbabwe setting at the levels of morphosyntax, phonology, lexis and discourse in both spoken and written contexts, drawing both upon the research literature and the author’s own corpus of conversational and interview speech of Zimbabweans of a range of ages, ethnicities, educational, socio-economic and language backgrounds. The chapter presents English in Zimbabwe as a collection of varieties and repertoires, performed contingently depending upon such factors as ethnicity and race, time, audience, ideology, rural-urban divide, socio-economic conditions and education.

This chapter surveys the origins and history of English in the South Atlantic Ocean, on Tristan da Cunha, St Helena and the Falkland Islands, from the late sixteenth century to the present day. Their evolution is a showcase scenario of contact and koinéization in that a substantial stock of British settlers had permanent contact with speakers of other languages or forms of English as a Second Language. There were concomitant cases of dialect contact, input from restructured varieties (possibly Portuguese Creoles), African languages, as well as interaction as a group of St Helenians cross-migrated to Tristan da Cunha. The community’s founders found themselves in tabula rasa conditions and had no contact with pre-existing varieties. The varieties formed ab ovo via direct contact of the inputs brought to the islands, enabling the reconstruction of social factors and population dynamics at work during the development of overseas Englishes.