“Bound together by a web”: Victorian literary and cultural conceptions of human-nature entanglement

This dissertation examines how the Victorians, in a world in which anthropogenic climate changes were becoming visible and much about the human-nature divide was shifting, understood not only how humans shaped and altered the environment, but how they were shaped and altered by non-human nature themselves. What follows is intended to develop a clearer understanding of how a variety of Victorian writers and thinkers conceptualized and represented the materiality of the human body within the increasingly complex biological framework of life—in what Darwin described as a state of being “bound together by a web of complex relations” (73). Focusing on a variety of genres, but in particular the novel, this project examines selections from Poems, in Two Volumes (1807) from William Wordsworth’s early career, George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859), Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1864–1865), Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd (1874), The Woodlanders (1886–1887), and The Return of the Native (1878), as well as William Morris’s socialist lectures of the 1880s and his utopian novel, News from Nowhere (1890). By examining these texts in conversation with each other, it is possible to better understand how Victorian culture more widely conceived of the rapidly changing relationship and shifting boundaries between human and nature. I argue that these literary and cultural outputs reflect a larger cultural shift from the early nineteenth century towards a more nuanced, more troubled, and more material understanding of humanity’s place in the wider web of life.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2024

Author dc:creator

• Ennis, Heather B.

Contributors dc:contributor

• Courtemanche, Eleanor
• Markley, Robert
• Murison, Justine S.
• Nazar, Hina

• British Literature
• Victorian Studies
• Victorian Culture
• Victorian Literature
• Ecocriticism
• Environmental Humanities
• George Eliot
• William Wordsworth
• Thomas Hardy
• John Ruskin
• William Morris
• History Of Science
• Utopias
• Utopian Fiction
• Utopian Studies
• The Novel
• Realist Novel
• Nineteenth-century Culture
• Charles Darwin
• British Socialism
• Adam Bede
• Our Mutual Friend
• Far From The Madding Crowd
• The Woodlanders
• The Return Of The Native
• News From Nowhere
• New Materialism
• Climate Change
• On The Origin Of Species
• 19th Century
• To A Highland Girl
• The Solitary Reaper
• Gillian Beer
• Darwinism
• Wessex
• English Landscape
• Rural England
• West Country
• Lake District
• The Country And The City
• Raymond Williams
• Fiona Maccarthy
• Miguel Abensour
• E. P. Thompson

Statement dc:rights

• © 2024 Heather B. Ennis

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/125617

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F125617