Description
Book SynopsisTraces an epistemological legacy from Romantic and Victorian ecological literature to modern scientific ecology. Investigates two essential and contrasting paradigms of nature that continue to be debated today.
Trade Review“Heidi Scott’s book belongs to the ‘new wave’ of ecocriticism—scientifically literate and fully engaged with the urgent issues of environmental deterioration, global warming, and sustainability. She connects the new scientific zeitgeist of complexity and chaos with the poetics of ecology, showing how, intriguingly, the poets got there first. More importantly, the sciences and humanities share a single vision here, as they must if the planet is to be saved.”
—Gillen D'Arcy Wood,University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
“This expansive, well-written, and provocative study employs key ecological tropes to generate important new insights into the environmental valence of Romantic and Victorian literature. Heidi Scott’s close examination of narratives of apocalypse and toxicity is especially powerful, as is her connection of an emergent nineteenth-century ecology to current ecological paradigms, including chaotic change, disturbance ecology, and natural systems theory. Profoundly interdisciplinary in bridging the natural sciences, the humanities, and the cultural discourses of ecology, Chaos and Cosmos is a genuinely significant contribution to current scholarship in ecocriticism.”
—Michael P. Branch,University of Nevada, Reno
“Heidi Scott's book deserves to be an instant classic of ecocritical analysis. Written in clear, often memorably vivid prose, Chaos and Cosmos is at once uniquely informed by scientific ecology and deeply satisfying as a work of literary criticism.”
—Greg Garrard,University of British Columbia
“Scott offers a deeply compelling illustration of what a genuinely interdisciplinary critical attempt can look like, and she does so with boldness, warmth, and a profound knowledge of both cultures she addresses.”
—Arden Hegele Studies in Romanticism
“The range of the book is wide and ambitious. A reader interested in the long nineteenth century as well as contemporary ecological matters should read this book.”
—Ann C. Colley Victorian Studies
“A thoughtful addition to an ecocritical idiom characterized by shuttling between current concerns and past resources.”
—Daniel Williams Victorian Literature and Culture
Table of ContentsContents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Beyond the Dichotomy
Part 1 Chaos
Romantic Chaos: Natural Patterns Disturbed
Victorian Chaos: Industrial Disruptions
Today’s Science Nonfiction
Part 2 Microcosm
Romantic Microcosms: Brain Worlds
Victorian Microcosms: Domestic Systems
Today’s Scientific Modeling
Part 3 Keats and Ecology: A Case Study
The Literary Empiricist
Hyperion: The Chaos of Tartarus
Microcosmic Odes
Epilogue
Works Consulted
