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Haunting Ecologies

Victorian Conceptions of Water
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Victorians' views of water and its role in how the social fabric of Victorian Britain was imagined Water matters like few other substances in people's daily lives. In the nineteenth century, it left its traces on politics, urban reform, and societal divisions, as well as on conceptualizations of gender roles. Drawing on the methodology of material ecocriticism, Ursula Kluwick's Haunting Ecologies argues that Victorian Britons were keenly aware of aquatic agency, recognizing water as an active force with the ability to infiltrate bodies and spaces. Kluwick reads works by canonical writers such as Braddon, Dickens, Stoker, and George Eliot alongside sanitary reform discourse, court cases, journalistic articles, satirical cartoons, technical drawings, paintings, and maps. This wide-ranging study sheds new light on Victorian-era anxieties about water contamination as well as on how certain wet landscapes such as sewers, rivers, and marshes became associated with moral corruption and crime. Applying ideas from the field of blue humanities to nineteenth-century texts, Haunting Ecologies argues for the relevance of realism as an Anthropocene form.
Ursula Kluwick is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Bern, Switzerland, and co-editor of The Beach in Anglophone Literatures and Cultures.
List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: Beyond Water as a Symbol Part I. Water and Pollution 1. Aquatic Discourse in the Era of Sanitary Reform: Water, Public Health, and the River Thames 2. The Aesthetics of Pollution: Charles Dickens's (In)Sanitary Waters Part II. Water and Transgression 3. Aquatic Social Space: The Imaginary Topography of Transgression 4. Floating Across: Water as Embodied Transgression Conclusion: New Horizons for the Blue Humanities Notes Bibliography Index
"Kluwick takes on a large topic with brio but also with careful attention. This is an unusually comprehensive and wide-ranging book, full of fresh insights about Victorian literature and culture."--Pamela Gilbert, University of Florida, author of Victorian Skin: Surface, Self, History
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