Anticipatory Materialisms in Literature and Philosophy, 1790–1930

Anticipatory Materialisms explores nineteenth and early twentieth-century literature that

anticipates and pre-empts the recent philosophical ‘turn’ to materiality and affect. Critical volumes that approach literature via the prism of New Materialism are in the ascendence. This collection stakes a different claim: by engaging with neglected theories of materiality in literary and philosophical works that antedate the twenty-first century ‘turn’ to New Materialism and theories of affect, the project aims to establish a dialogue between recent theoretical considerations of people-world relations in literature and that which has gone before. This project seeks to demonstrate the particular and meaningful ways in which interactions between people and the physical world were being considered in literature between the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The project does not propose an air of finality; indeed, it is our hope that offering provocative and challenging chapters, which approach the subject from various critical and thematic perspectives, the collection will establish a broader dialogue regarding the ways in philosophy and literature have intersected and informed each other over the course of the long nineteenth century.

Part I Romantic Materialisms.- 2. Mountain Matter(s): Anticipatory Cartographies in Nineteenth-Century Mountain Literature - Joanna E. Taylor

3. Materiality, the Recessive Body and Wordsworth’s Sonnets “To Sleep” - Nick Dodd

4. Anticipating New Materialisms Through Schelling’s Speculative Physics - Luke Moffat

5. Vibrant Textuality: Material Texts and Romantic Anticipations - Andrew Raven

Part II Victorian Materialisms

6. “The Impatient Anticipations of Our Reason”: Rough Sympathy in Friedrich Schiller and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre - Jo Carruthers

7. Mobile Materiality: The Great Exhibition of 1851 and the Mobile-Material Relations of Henry Mayhew’s 1851: or, the Adventures of Mr and Mrs Sandboys - Charlotte Mathieson

8. Arboreal Thinking: George Eliot and the Matter of Life in Adam Bede - Ruth Livesey

9. “With Ears Alive to Every Sound”: Thomas Hardy’s Desperate Remedies and the (Im)materiality of Listening - Rebecca Spence

10. Praying Kin: Christina Rossetti and the Unity of Things - Emma Mason

Part III Modern Materialisms

11. Making Human Homes: Willa Cather on People and Wilderness - Eileen John

12. “A smell! A true Florentine smell!”: Tourists’ Embodied Experiences in E. M. Forster’s Fiction - Nour Dakkak

13. Edward Thomas and Robert Frost: To Earthward - Ralph Pite

Jo Carruthers has taught at the Universities of Manchester, Bristol and Lancaster and has published widely in the areas of literary studies, aesthetics, and religious and national identities. She has published two monographs, England’s Secular Scripture: Islamophobia and the Protestant Aesthetic (2011), and Esther through the Centuries (2008), the edited collection (with Andrew Tate) Spiritual Identities: Literature and the Post-Secular Imagination (2011), and co-edited with Mark Knight and Andrew Tate Literature and the Bible: A Reader (2014). 

Nour Dakkak is a PhD candidate and associate lecturer in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Lancaster University. Her research examines human-world relationships in the works of E. M. Forster with a special interest in the representations of mobilities and materialities.

Rebecca Spence is a PhD candidate and associate lecturer in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Lancaster University, funded by an AHRC NWCDTP +3 full-time award. Her research is driven by an interest in how nineteenth-century authors use auditory processes as both representational and experiential models for exploring the complexities of interpersonal communication in literary works.