Victorian Ecocriticism: The Politics of Place and Early Environmental Justice aims to take up the challenge that Lawrence Buell lays out in The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (2005). Buell decries: “For in order to bring ‘environmental justice into ecocriticism,’ a few more articles or conference sessions won’t suffice. There must be ‘a fundamental rethinking and reworking of the field as a whole’” (Buell 113). While discussions about nature conservation and preservation have been important within the context of ecocriticism, Buell asserts that the holy grail for the field is actually how literary critics engage in discourse about questions of place as space humanized for the purpose of tracing, disclosing, and advancing the important issue of environmental justice—as it applies to human beings, animals, and plants. The “fundamental reworking” or shift in the field of Victorian Studies really has to do with the dearth of ecocritical publishing about seminal authors and literary texts. Victorian Ecocriticism aims to participate in filling that vacuum, lack, or lacuna by featuring current research about the Victorian era from an ecocritical perspective. Victorian Ecocriticism hopes to identify, establish, and organize its content based on six themes: Ecocrisis, Ecofeminism, Ecogothicism, Ecohistoricism, Ecotheology, and Ecological Interdependence. The edited collection, thus, has two aims. First, selected places among others featured in the edition will provide environmental contexts, often with political implications: American rural landscape (e.g., Walden Pond), Australian mines, British hill-country, metropolis, mill towns, the sea, and the woods. Second, the edition includes discussions about various instances of early environmental justice evident during the mid-nineteenth century such as, but not limited to: anti-railway campaigns, biological egalitarianism, labor disputes due to adverse working conditions, patterns of displacement, reactions to Victorian scientism, resistance to enclosure, and working class education. Victorian Ecocriticism is an interdisciplinary edition. It focuses on Victorian literature as the foundational discipline linked to various disciplines such as ecology, evolutionary biology, natural history, and soil science. The topics are wide-ranging, significant, and contemporary discussing the politics of place as well as early environmental justice.

The rise of suburbs and the disinvestment from cities have been defining features of life in many countries over the course of the twentieth century, especially English-speaking countires. The separation of different aspects of life, such as living and working, and the diffusion of the population in far-flung garden homes have necessitated the enormous consumption of natural lands and the constant use of mechanized transportation. Why did we abandon our dense, complex urban places and seek to find 'the best of the city and the country' in the flowery suburbs? Looking back at the architecture and urban design of the 1800s offers some answers, but a missing piece in the story is found in Victorian utopian literature. The replacement of cities with high-tech suburbs was repeatedly imagined and breathlessly described in the socialist dreams and science-fiction fantasies of dozens of British and American authors. Some of these visionaries -- such as Robert Owen, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Edward Bellamy, William Morris, Ebenezer Howard, and H.G. Wells -- are enduringly famous, while others were street vendors or amateur chemists who have been all but forgotten. Together, they fashioned strange and beautiful imaginary worlds built of synthetic gemstones, lacy metal colonnades, and unbreakable glass, staffed by robotic servants and teeming with flying carriages. As different as their futuristic visions could be, however, most of them were unified by a single, desperate plea: for humanity to have a future worth living, we must abandon our smoky, poor, chaotic Babylonian cities for a life in shimmering gardens.

Proposing the concept of transformation as a key to understanding the Victorian period, this collection explores the protean ways in which the nineteenth century conceived of, responded to, and created change. The volume focuses on literature, particularly issues related to genre, nationalism, and desire. For example, the essays suggest that changes in the novel's form correspond with shifting notions of human nature in Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris; technical forms such as the villanelle and chant royal are crucial bridges between Victorian and Modernist poetics; Victorian theater moves from privileging the text to valuing the spectacles that characterized much of Victorian staging; Carlyle's Past and Present is a rallying cry for replacing the static and fractured language of the past with a national language deep in shared meaning; Dante Gabriel Rossetti posits unachieved desire as the means of rescuing the subject from the institutional forces that threaten to close down and subsume him; and the return of Adelaide Anne Procter's fallen nun to the convent in "A Legend of Provence" can be read as signaling a more modern definition of gender and sexuality that allows for the possibility of transgressive desire within society. The collection concludes with an essay that shows neo-Victorian authors like John Fowles and A. S. Byatt contending with the Victorian preoccupations with gender and sexuality.