Imagining ecology: species/energy/dimension in nineteenth-century speculative fiction
Date
2022
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
This dissertation dwells in the fictional ecologies imagined by Romantic and Victorian authors. It revisits the relationship between nineteenth-century literature and science through speculative fiction (an expansive category of non-realist narratives including but not limited to science fiction, fantasy, and fairy tales). The nineteenth century saw a series of scientific advancements radically reshape public knowledge about the nature of the material world and Britons’ sense of human relationships to the nonhuman. As evolutionary theory made narratable the webs of relation connecting organisms across deep time and planetary space, thermodynamics revealed an invisible system of energy flows upon which all known forms of life depend. Meanwhile, the production of affordable microscopes made the British public increasingly aware of human bodies as inhabited worlds. Against this background, writers turned to developing forms of speculative fiction through which they both communicated abstract scientific concepts to lay audiences and explored the new models of ecological relation, agency, and ethics those concepts engendered. If, as the recent turn in ecocritical scholarship indicates, we wish to understand how the imaginative interplay of nineteenth-century literary and scientific forms helped shape ecological thinking, then we must consider speculative fiction’s role in that process. Imagining Ecology: Species/Energy/Dimension in Nineteenth-Century Speculative Fiction takes up this task in chapters on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Victorian fairy stories, and Edwin Abbott Abbott’s Flatland (1884). Each chapter examines speculative fictional forms in relation to a key nineteenth-century scientific concept: species, energy, and dimension, respectively. Weaving together close readings of canonical and non-canonical works of literature with analysis of scientific textbooks and thought experiments, I reveal the degree to which speculative fiction cut across nineteenth-century domains of knowledge—from biology to physics to mathematics and beyond—in ways that invite ecological perspectives. Whether by suggesting we embrace “dimension” alongside “scale” as an ecocritical keyword in light of Flatland or by arguing that Victorian fairy stories moved beyond mere anxiety over energy exhaustion to dream up alternative systems of energy care, Imagining Ecology shows how reading nineteenth-century speculative fiction and science through one another can generate new ecocritical insights on well-worn and understudied texts alike.
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Keywords
Ecocriticism, Environmental humanities, Fantasy, Romantic, Science fiction, Victorian