Victorian Environments

Grace Moore is a Senior Research Fellow at the Australian Research Council’s Centre for Excellence in the History of Emotions at the University of Melbourne, Australia, where she is also a Senior Lecturer in Victorian studies.  Her monograph, Dickens and Empire was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Award for Literary Scholarship in 2006.  She is the author of The Victorian Novel in Context (2012), and several edited collections. Michelle J. Smith is a Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies at Monash University, Australia. Her monograph Empire in British Girls’ Literature and Culture: Imperial Girls, 1880–1915 (Palgrave, 2011) won the European Society for the Study of English’s Book Award for Junior Scholars in 2012. With Kristine Moruzi and Clare Bradford, she is the author of From Colonial to Modern: Transnational Girlhood in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Children’s Literature (1840-1940) (2018). She is currently working on astudy of female beauty in Victorian literature and periodicals. 

1. Introduction: Grace Moore & Michelle J. Smith.- 2. “The Environmentally Modified Self: Acclimatization and Identity in Early Victorian Literature”: Roslyn Jolly.- 3. “Rabbits and the Rise of Australian Nativism”: Alexis Harley.- 4. “’Our Antipodes:’ Settler Colonial Environments in Victorian Travel Writing”: Anna Johnston.- 5. “Ubiquitous Theft: The Consumption of London in Mayhew’s Underworld”: Lesa Scholl.- 6. “’Mountains might be marked by a drop of glue:’ Blindness, Touch and the Tangible Map”: Vanessa Warne.- 7. “Exhuming the City: London’s Victorian Cemeteries and the Afterlife”: Haewon Hwang.- 8. “Speculative Viewing: Victorians’ Encounters with Coral Reefs”: Kathleen Davidson.- 9. “The Nature of Female Beauty: Floriography and Sensation Fiction”: Kirby-Jane Hallum.- 10. “Neptune’s Daughters: Women and Australian Marine Visual Culture”: Molly Duggins.- 11. “Inorganic Bodies Longing to Become Organic: Revolutionary Appetite in Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution”: Hayley Rudkin.- 12. “‘Yet Was It Human?’ Bankim, Hunter and the Victorian Famine Ideology of Anandamath”: Pablo Mukherjee.- 13. “Adulteration in Jude the Obscure”: Tim Dolin.

“The essays in this book … are all engaging and well written. … A strength of this collection is the contribution it makes to readings of colonial Australian environments, but its broad scope means there will be something for most scholars working on the topics of Victorian nature and the environment. There are plenty of offerings that might interest readers … .” (Cheryl Blake Price, The Wilkie Collins Journal, wilkiecollinssociety.org, Vol. 18, 2021)