Errant Natures and Wayward Bodies in Late-Victorian Speculative Fiction

(Hardback)

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Adrian Tait argues that late-Victorian stories represent an important but still neglected part of a green literary tradition, setting up a dialogue with modernity that is no less relevant today.

Late-Victorian literature is full of fascinating examples of what was then called the scientific romance, an emerging form of science or speculative fiction whose concern with the liveliness or agentiality of the nonhuman animal and more-than-human, natural world today makes it particularly noteworthy. In a succession of short stories and novels, many now forgotten, writers such as Grant Allen, John Davidson, George Griffith, and Henry Marriott Watson dramatized the possibility that Nature had not been conquered by industrial modernity, but might instead be reacting to it with an unexpected dynamism. Long before environmental issues such as climate change came to the publics attention, they asked whether humankind might one day inadvertently create existential threats to its own survival. In so doing, these pioneers of sf depicted their world in terms that anticipate the recent new materialist focus on a mutable and dynamic reality, responsive and perhaps resistant to human endeavor.

Reviews

Taits astute and typically skillful study of late-Victorian speculative fiction is a welcome expansion of a field whose value to ecocritical scholarship is now being increasingly recognized for its timely insights into the rise of anxieties about anthropogenic impacts on our fragile world. * Mark Frost, Associate Professor of Literature and Environment, University of Portsmouth, UK *

Author Bio

Adrian Tait is an independent scholar