Trees in Nineteenth-Century English Fiction

<p>This is a book about a longstanding network of writers and writings that celebrate the aesthetic socio-political scientific ecological geographical and historical value of trees and tree spaces in the landscape; and it is a study of the effect of this tree-writing upon the novel form in the long nineteenth century.</p><p><i>Trees in Nineteenth-Century English Fiction: The Silvicultural Novel </i>identifies the picturesque thinker William Gilpin as a significant influence in this literary and environmental tradition. <i>Remarks on Forest Scenery </i>(1791) is formed by Gilpin’s own observations of trees forests and his New Forest home specifically; but it is also the product of tree-stories collected from ‘travellers and historians’ that came before him. This study tracks the impact of this accumulating arboreal discourse upon nineteenth-century environmental writers such as John Claudius Loudon Jacob George Strutt William Howitt and Mary Roberts and its influence on varied dialogues surrounding natural history agriculture landscaping deforestation and public health. Building upon this concept of an ongoing silvicultural discussion the monograph examines how novelists in the realist mode engage with this discourse and use their understanding of arboreal space and its cultural worth in order to transform their own fictional environments. Through their novelistic framing of single trees clumps forests ancient woodlands and man-made plantations Jane Austen Elizabeth Gaskell and Thomas Hardy feature as authors of particular interest. Collectively in their environmental representations these novelists engage with a broad range of silvicultural conversation in their writing of space at the beginning middle and end of the nineteenth century.</p><p>This book will be of great interest to students researchers and academics working in the environmental humanities long nineteenth-century literature nature writing and environmental literature environmental history ecocriticism and literature and science scholarship.</p>