Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire, edited by Nathan K. Hensley and Philip Steer

Abstract

Reviewed by: Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire ed. by Nathan K. Hensley and Philip Steer Ursula Kluwick (bio) Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire, edited by Nathan K. Hensley and Philip Steer; pp. 261. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018, $110.00, $35.00 paper, $34.99 ebook. Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire is an exciting collection that does more than fill several important gaps in the field of ecocriticism. Certainly, the collection offers a welcome intervention within the fields of ecocriticism and Victorian studies by turning the spotlight on the nineteenth century, which has hitherto received somewhat less attention in environmental criticism than, for instance, the early modern period or the present. The broad range of authors, texts, and concerns analyzed by the contributors impressively showcases the relevance of ecocriticism to Victorian studies. But the collection goes much further than marking out Victorian ecocriticism as a promising subfield. Instead, it performs the leap signaled by the transition from ecocriticism to the environmental humanities: it shows the extent to which ecological issues are entangled with other concerns—not simply because environmental questions can fruitfully be posed alongside other questions, but because they intersect with other lines of inquiry, methodologically and practically. This is exemplified by the editors' own essay, "Signatures of the Carboniferous: The literary Forms of Coal," which devises a "hermeneutics of coal." Probing the "structuring role" played by coal across a range of texts (67), Nathan K. Hensley and Philip Steer highlight conjunctions between narrative infrastructure and energy regime to show how the logic of coal shapes literary form and, beyond that, "the form of thought itself" (78). Their carboniferous rereading of texts by Elizabeth Gaskell and Joseph Conrad challenges critical categories such as the transition between Victorianism and modernism. But Ecological Form also offers other interventions. The focus on empire brings together nineteenth-century ecological and postcolonial criticism, productively extending their intersection beyond the contemporary questions to which it has hitherto largely been confined. As Sukanya Banerjee writes in a superb essay on indigo and drama, the collection shows us that, "if over the last two decades we have reached a stage in which it is difficult to absent the history of empire from that of Victorian Britain, then we are now also at the stage where we cannot speak of 'empire' in terms of its human constituency alone" (24). Banerjee's essay highlights the interaction of human and more-than-human forces within colonialism by foregrounding the socioecological character of empire. Reading Nil Darpan (1860), Dinabandhu Mitra's play about the late 1850s Bengali indigo rebellion, in conjunction with the colonial history of indigo cultivation and its social consequences, Banerjee proposes groundedness as a critical concept that [End Page 331] makes visible the confluence of the agencies of colonizer, colonized, playwright, and the material environment—including, literally, the ground—within which their interactions and theatrical performance take place. Most programmatically, the collection engages with form and the role of the aesthetic for the production and representation of ecological knowledge. Specifically, it explores how Victorian forms frame ecological knowledge through aesthetic structures and how the representational challenges of environmental change and crisis in turn shape cultural form. In addition, it also examines how the Anthropocene shapes our perception of nineteenth-century literature. As this suggests, Ecological Form approaches form as a two-pronged effect: one of production (ecological knowledge is modelled by but also affects forms of representation) and one of reception (awareness of the Anthropocene transforms, or needs to transform, our perception of nineteenth-century texts). The resulting fluidity of the concept of form itself as sketched by the individual chapters is one of the greatest assets of the collection. Ecological Form embraces a wide range of genres, from canonical realist novels by Charles Dickens (Adam Grener), George Eliot (Elizabeth Carolyn Miller), and Gaskell (Hensley and Steer) to utopian fiction (Benjamin Morgan), Thomas Hardy's romances (Aaron Rosenberg), the elegy (Jesse Oak Taylor), science fiction (Karen Pinkus), satire (Teresa Shewry), drama (Banerjee), botanical writing (Lynn Voskuil), lectures by John Ruskin (Deanna K. Kreisel), and the writings of Martin Delany (Monique Allewaert). Yet...