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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2020

Terraforming England: the shifting landscapes of Richard Jefferies (1848-1887)

Résumé

In the opening pages of Richard Jefferies’s 1877 novel World’s End, a combination of mineral, vegetal, and animal agencies combine to turn an unremarkable piece of land into a swamp; once humans come onto the scene and the ogres named ‘Steam’ and ‘Legal Rights’ are aroused, the swamp is transformed into a monstrous city over whose possession the novel’s characters then fight bitterly. In Jefferies’s later and more famous romance, After London, Or: Wild England, published in 1885 but taking place in a relatively distant future, London itself undergoes a similar if opposite transformation and becomes a poisonous swamp, while much of southern England is flooded and turned into an inland sea or lake. In recent years, the ecocritical turn has inspired much interest in Jefferies, who has been read alongside Darwin and British naturalists, as an inspiration for William Morris’s ecotopian vision, and as an early thinker of the Anthropocene and the posthuman. This paper, however, focuses more specifically on the interactions between land and water in the work of Richard Jefferies, attending to the ways in which his fluid environments come to express both the fears and hopes of late Victorian England. Environment, in these works, is not merely a background but an agent, not static but in flux. This paper will therefore examine the very processes by which Jefferies’s landscapes are transformed. In his work on terraforming (the deliberate shaping of environments by human agency) as concept and literary motif, Chris Pak shows that science-fiction provides us with spaces in which to rethink the interaction between humanity and its environment. Narratives of catastrophe and terraformation constitute thought experiments in which humanity’s relation to its environment can be reconsidered. Jefferies’s work, anticipating H.G. Wells’s scientific romances, accordingly presents us with a view of Britain’s imperial and industrial society as both immensely powerful and deeply fragile. Moreover, Jefferies’s key-image of the city as past or future swamp, that is, as transitional environment, in-between land and water, mirrors depictions of the urban environment by social reformers such as Charles Booth or William Booth, who imagined poverty as a liquid force in whose dangerous undertows the working-classes were liable to be caught. Finally, this paper engages with Antonis Basalopoulos’s concept of the ‘oceanic novum’ – that is, the early-modern conception of the sea as an empty, unbounded, and therefore utopian space that challenges and disrupts the enclosed, finite territories which occupy land. The primeval empty land of World’s End, and the inland sea of After London, it will be argued, constitute a similarly ‘other’ space, the alien and perhaps utopian obverse of late Victorian England’s cultivated, bounded, exploited landscape.
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Dates et versions

hal-03994879 , version 1 (17-02-2023)

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  • HAL Id : hal-03994879 , version 1

Citer

Marielle Lippmann. Terraforming England: the shifting landscapes of Richard Jefferies (1848-1887). ACCUTE Congress, ACCUTE - VSAO joint panel, May 2020, En ligne, Canada. ⟨hal-03994879⟩
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