Reconceiving Nature

Ecofeminism in Late Victorian Women's Poetry

PATRICIA MURPHY

268 pages

Published: March 2019

ISBN: 9780826274298

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Price: $55.00

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About This Book: Surprisingly, glimmerings of ecofeminist theory that would emerge a century later can be detected in women’s poetry of the late Victorian period. In Reconceiving Nature, Patricia Murphy examines the work of six ecofeminist poets—Augusta Webster, Mathilde Blind, Michael Field, Alice Meynell, Constance Naden, and L. S. Bevington—who contested the exploitation of the natural world. Challenging prevalent assumptions that nature is inferior, rightly subordinated, and deservedly manipulated, these poets instead “reconstructed” nature.
Authors and Editors: Patricia Murphy is Professor Emerita of English at Missouri Southern State University and the author of four books, including The New Woman Gothic: Reconfigurations of Distress and In Science’s Shadow: Literary Constructions of Late Victorian Women (both University of Missouri Press) and Time Is of the Essence: Temporality, Gender, and the New Woman (SUNY Press). She lives in Joplin, Missouri.
Praise For This Book: “An important contribution both to the growing field of interdisciplinary scholarship on ecofeminism in literature and to a new wave of fin-de-siècle studies that seeks to revisit and reconfigure the period by challenging twentieth-century modernist assumptions about late-century literature and culture.”—James Diedrick, Agnes Scott College, author of Mathilde Blind: Late Victorian Culture and the Woman of Letters

“Performs an important function in reclaiming some non-canonical writers who, nevertheless, were generally much better known in their period and who, it is convincingly argued, can speak to contemporary ecological concerns.”—John Parham, University of Worcester, author of Green Man Hopkins: Poetry and the Victorian Ecological Imagination

"Reconceiving Nature makes important contributions to our understanding of several late-Victorian women poets. Murphy interweaves extensive close readings of individual poems with reflections on a diverse range of ecofeminist scholarship since the 1970s."—Lee Behlman, Associate Professor of English, Montclair State University, co-editor of Victorian Literature: Criticism and Debates

"Murphy's examination of 'proto-ecofeminist' poets is fascinating and timely. It is an important addition to both the fields of ecofeminism and Victorian studies. Her work is particularly important as we consider contemporary conversations about environmental concerns and the dangers inherent in viewing humans as separate from nature."—Melissa Purdue, Minnesota State University, co-editor of New Woman Writers, Authority and the Body

"Superbly demonstrates how women’s poetry (and not only prose) of that Transition Period contributed significantly to ecological and gender debates of the time, and especially to a reconceptualization of women’s subjectivity so that its irrepressible aspects are appreciated and acknowledged."—Anna Despotopoulou, English Literature in Transition

"It is a privilege to read a critical book that so carefully attends to the lyrically captivating verse of these women even as it situates them in the historical and political formation of one of the most important movements of our time."—Emma Mason, Victorian Studies