ABSTRACT

In this volume, emerging and established scholars bring ethical and political concerns for the environment, nonhuman animals and social justice to the study of nineteenth-century visual culture. They draw their theoretical inspiration from the vitality of emerging critical discourses, such as new materialism, ecofeminism, critical animal studies, food studies, object-oriented ontology and affect theory. This timely volume looks back at the early decades of the Anthropocene to query the agency of visual culture to critique, create and maintain more resilient and biologically diverse local and global ecologies.

chapter 1|12 pages

Introduction

part 1|64 pages

Political Ecologies and the Movement of Things

chapter 2|16 pages

“A Demonstration to the World”

Art, Political Ecology and the Global American Civil War

chapter 3|17 pages

Crafting “Nature”

Ecocriticism, Environmental Violence and the Transnational Arts and Crafts Movement

chapter 4|12 pages

An Ecolonial Reassessment of the Indian Craze

Elbridge Ayer Burbank and Standing Bear

chapter 5|15 pages

The Panama Canal Zone as a Hybrid Landscape

A Case Study 1

part 2|55 pages

Material Ecologies

chapter 6|13 pages

“A Gruesome Sight”

Randolph Rogers’s Nydia in a Marble World

chapter 7|8 pages

Cryoscapes

Snow and Fantasies of Freezing in the Art of George Henry Durrie 1

chapter 8|14 pages

Picturing Industrial Landscapes

Ecocriticism in Constantin Meunier’s and Maximilien Luce’s Paintings of Belgium’s Black Country

chapter 9|18 pages

Ruskin’s Storm-Cloud and Tyndall’s Blue Sky

New Materialist Diffractions of Nineteenth-Century Atmospheres

part 3|35 pages

Depletion and Conservation of Natural Resources

chapter 10|10 pages

Gilded Age Dining

Eco-Anxiety, Fisheries Management and the Presidential China of Rutherford B. Hayes

chapter 12|9 pages

“A Better Acquaintanceship with Our Fellows of the Wild”

George Shiras and the Limits of Trap Camera Photography

part 4|51 pages

Natural Histories/Animal Agencies

chapter 13|8 pages

Petting Billy

Albert Laessle’s Significant Other(ness)

chapter 14|14 pages

Looking at Leviathan

The First Live Cetaceans in Britain

chapter 15|16 pages

How to Wear the Feather

Bird Hats and Ecocritical Aesthetics

chapter 16|12 pages

Visualizations of “Nature”

Entomology and Ecological Envisioning in the Art of Willem Roelofs and Vincent van Gogh

part 5|34 pages

Agriculture and Resource Husbandry

chapter 17|10 pages

Coffee House Slip

Ecocriticism and Global Trade in Francis Guy’s Tontine Coffee House, N.Y.C.

chapter 18|10 pages

“A Haunch of a Countess”

John Constable and the Deer Park at Helmingham Hall

chapter 19|14 pages

Cultivating Fruit and Equality

The Still-Life Paintings of Robert Duncanson