IsisCB Explore

Thesis ID: CBB001561216

Chaos and the Microcosm: Literary Ecology in the Nineteenth-Century (2009)

University of Maryland, College Park
Fraistat, Neil
Publication date: 2009
Language: English

Publication Date: 2009
Edition Details: Advisor: Fraistat, Neil
Physical Details: 295 pp.

Outside Links

This dissertation investigates literary responses to environmental change in nineteenth-century England. Two tropes, chaos in narrative and the microcosm in lyric poetry, suggest how literary works may have been precursors of ecological science. I argue that literary epistemology in the long nineteenth-century developed precocious theories of the way nature operates based on contingent narrative and microcosm systems. These ideas were adopted as empirical strategies once scientific ecology emerged in the twentieth-century, and both tropes are prominent in twenty-first century ecological science. Ecology appeared late among scientific disciplines partly because it relies on cooperation between reduction and holism: climate change theory, for example, uses microcosm models to develop narratives of environmental contingency. Five chapters consider these two tropes from historical, literary, and scientific perspectives. The first chapter is a historical introduction to nineteenth-century science that traces the development of environmental awareness from industrial pollution and early studies of nature in microcosm, especially in the work of Charles Darwin and Stephen Forbes. Chapter two investigates four narratives of environmental chaos spanning the long nineteenth-century: Gilbert White, Mary Shelley, Richard Jefferies and H.G. Wells emplot the radical new notion of a post-apocalypse environment in narratives that rely on chaotic discontinuity, rather than the coherent gradualism that marked evolutionary theories of the time. Chapter three examines microcosmic imagery in the work of several important poets, including William and Dorothy Wordsworth, John Clare, Percy Shelley, and Matthew Arnold. I argue that the imagination and close observation of nineteenth-century poets helped the nascent sciences conceive of ways to simplify nature without dismembering its complex structures. Chapter four, devoted to the ecological thinking of John Keats, traces his abandonment of teleological narrative in Hyperion in preference for the microcosmic Odes. Finally, chapter five reconciles the two tropes with an excursion into modern ecosystem science, paying particular attention to our contemporary strategies for investigating climate change. This chapter serves as a summation of the dissertation by complicating the dichotomy between chaotic narrative and model-microcosm, and it brings the study into concerns of the present day. References References (153)

...More

Description Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 70/06 (2009). Pub. no. AAT 3359421.

Citation URI

data.isiscb.org/p/isis/citation/CBB001561216

This citation is part of the Isis database.

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Chapter Lynn Voskuil; (2017)
Victorian Orchids and the Forms of Ecological Society (/p/isis/citation/CBB040387941/)

Book Bowerbank, Sylvia Lorraine; (2004)
Speaking for Nature: Women and Ecologies of Early Modern England (/p/isis/citation/CBB000520064/)

Book Hillary Eklund; (2017)
Ground-Work: English Renaissance Literature and Soil Science (/p/isis/citation/CBB688646795/)

Book Allen MacDuffie; (2014)
Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination (/p/isis/citation/CBB466899717/)

Book Wittering, Shirley; (2013)
Ecology and Enclosure: The Effect of Enclosure on Society, Farming and the Environment in South Cambridgeshire, 1798--1850 (/p/isis/citation/CBB001420312/)

Article Christie Harner; (2020)
Animal and Social Ecologies in Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey (/p/isis/citation/CBB719406434/)

Article Hamlin, Christopher; (2012)
Charles Kingsley: From Being Green to Green Being (/p/isis/citation/CBB001211492/)

Article Seán Hewitt; Anna Pilz; (2021)
Ecologies of the Atlantic Archipelago (/p/isis/citation/CBB507543313/)

Article Parham, John; (2010)
Dickens in the City: Science, Technology, Ecology in the Novels of Charles Dickens (/p/isis/citation/CBB001022458/)

Book Davis, Diana K; Burke, Edmund, III; (2011)
Environmental Imaginaries of the Middle East and North Africa (/p/isis/citation/CBB001422305/)

Book Kilcup, Karen L; (2013)
Fallen Forests: Emotion, Embodiment, and Ethics in American Women's Environmental Writing, 1781--1924 (/p/isis/citation/CBB001420306/)

Book Page, Michael R.; (2012)
The Literary Imagination from Erasmus Darwin to H.G. Wells: Science, Evolution, and Ecology (/p/isis/citation/CBB001320100/)

Book Ingram, Annie Merrill; (2007)
Coming into Contact: Explorations In Ecocritical Theory and Practice (/p/isis/citation/CBB001035376/)

Book Peter Capuano; (2015)
Changing Hands: Industry, Evolution, and the Reconfiguration of the Victorian Body (/p/isis/citation/CBB393699048/)

Chapter L. Anne Delgado; (2017)
Psychical Research and the Fantastic Science of Spirits (/p/isis/citation/CBB741344391/)

Article McGowan-Hartmann, John; (2013)
Shadow of the Dragon: The Convergence of Myth and Science in Nineteenth Century Paleontological Imagery (/p/isis/citation/CBB001450319/)

Book DeWitt, Anne; (2013)
Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel (/p/isis/citation/CBB001202295/)

Book Benjamin Morgan; (2017)
The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature (/p/isis/citation/CBB589999395/)

Article Bayley, Mel; (2007)
Hard Times and Statistics (/p/isis/citation/CBB000831565/)

Book Malane, Rachel Ann; (2005)
Sex in Mind: The Gendered Brain in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Mental Sciences (/p/isis/citation/CBB000930449/)