This collection of essays turns to the nineteenth century in order to weigh the legacy of its holistic conception of systems and to resurrect alternative discourses of openness, permeability, and indeterminate relation. If modern ecocriticism has sometimes been hobbled by a restrictively organic, harmonious conception of how ecologies work, we wager that a return to Victorian interrogations of natural and social collectives can furnish more open, less integrated models for how assemblages operate. The nineteenth century saw both the first acceleration of anthropogenic climate change and the birth of a host of sciences-economic, social, geological, energetic, and (yes) ecological-that now struggle to address the planetary implications of that acceleration. Our growing awareness that we are now living in the long tail of this conjuncture and at the birth of the Anthropocene has prompted a re-evaluation of what we think we know about how nature and society work, and how they might work together.

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This essay considers art critic, environmental reformer, and heterodox political economist John Ruskin as an early sustainability theorist through an examination of his commitment to organicism. That commitment manifests in Ruskin’s struggle to differentiate the living from the non-living, most evident in his writings on crystals, leaves, and iron: “The Work of Iron, In Nature, Art, and Policy” (1858) and The Ethics of Dust (1866). This struggle is discussed in the context of his heterdox political economy as an early demand theorist, and his idiosyncratic writings on economic value as inhering in anything that avails “toward life.” By arguing that Ruskin is an important precursor to contemporary ecocritical discourse, it complicates recent critical readings of Ruskin’s anthropocentrism and instrumental aesthetics.

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This essay explores the coincidence of boredom, animalism, and trance states in several late-Victorian and early modernist texts. Through analyses of colonialist novels, mid-Victorian writings on the automaton debate, and case studies of Indian ““wolf children,”” it demonstrates how attempts to escape dehumanizing boredom have paradoxical results, leading to confrontations with other emblems of the bestial and uniting the animal and the automaton, human and machine.