Introduction:

Tidwell, Christy; Soles, Carter

doi:10.5325/j.ctv1mvw8h1.4

Fear and Nature 2021

DOI: 10.5325/j.ctv1mvw8h1.4

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Introduction:

Christy Tidwell¹,

Carter Soles²

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“…As Christy Tidwell and Carter Soles suggest in the introduction to their collection Fear and Nature, "Ecohorror in the Anthropocene presents a vision of [the] terraformed planet as frightening rather than promising and reflects both the horrors we face now and those we fear will occur in the future." 6 Chang's Novel Cultivations locates this shift in the late nineteenth century, when plants took on the horrific aspects of our own destructive voraciousness.…”

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Undisciplined Reading

Briefel¹

2022

Victorian Literature and Culture

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In their field-shaking 2020 essay, “Undisciplining Victorian Studies,” Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Alicia Mireles Christoff, and Amy R. Wong set out to “think carefully and deliberately about how we can develop a truly relational thinking and set of practices that engage scholarship across fields and disciplines, enabling a cross-fertilization of ideas, a coalition-based politics and activism, and even a refashioning of academic structures to better serve the purposes of equity and justice.” Sukanya Banerjee, Ryan D. Fong, and Helena Michie make a similarly powerful call in their introductory essay, “Widening the Nineteenth Century,” for a 2021 special issue of Victorian Literature and Culture. This “widening” occurs across different fields and dimensions, stemming from a “wish to examine the interpretive and methodological possibilities that emerge when we expand our objects of study beyond what has been ordained by the temporal—and spatial—purview of the British nineteenth century, which is to say that we wish to put further pressure on the geotemporal linkage that has largely tethered studies of the nineteenth century to the geographic confines of Britain.” My sense is that central to these projects to “undiscipline” and “widen” the Victorian field should be a reexamining of our reading practices as scholars. What do we read, and when? Do we stick to our “subfields,” however we define these, or do we venture elsewhere? And what does it look like to read “elsewhere” while continuing to produce meaningful scholarship?

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confidence: 99%

Undisciplined Reading

Briefel¹

2022

Victorian Literature and Culture

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‘Embowered in a mass of vegetation’: Confinement and Predatory Plants in Fin-de-Siècle Fiction

Purdue

2023

Victoriographies

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In our present moment of ecological crises, stories about nature fighting back take on new significance. This article looks back at fin-de-siècle stories about predatory plants that entrap people, examining texts such as Edmond Nolcini's ‘The Guardian of Mystery Island’ (1896), H.G. Wells’ ‘The Flowering of the Strange Orchid’ (1894), and Lucy H. Hooper's ‘Carnivorine’ (1889). These stories focus on killer plants that grab and confine characters with their tentacle-like branches and vines, ultimately suffocating them in their foliage. Like other gothic monsters, these plants reveal societal anxieties (colonialism, women, degeneration, and so on) at moments of transition. Given our twenty-first-century anxieties about environmental destruction, we need to look back at ecophobic moments in earlier literature to understand, as Simon C. Estok argues in ‘Theorizing the EcoGothic’, ‘how monstrosity is central to an environmental imagination that locates the human as the center of all things good and safe’ (34). Ideally, this historical interrogation can help us transition to new and healthier relationships with our environments in the present.

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Introduction:

Cited by 2 publications

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Undisciplined Reading

Undisciplined Reading

‘Embowered in a mass of vegetation’: Confinement and Predatory Plants in Fin-de-Siècle Fiction

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