This essay argues that the diverse strands of Charles Kingsley's work---as nature writer, clergyman, and novelist, among others---can be united through an ecocritical approach that underscores his literary projection of a green identity. By conceiving of the imagination as situated between what he saw as the purely passive work of scholarship or art and the active engagement of physical labor, Kingsley forged an answer to a problem that continues to engage ecocritics: What autonomy, if any, does the imagination have when humanity is understood as the product of evolution? In rejecting easy dualisms and recognizing the co-dependence of imagination and fact, of art, science, and morality, Kingsley demands that we confront our partiality and fragility as biotic beings.
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