A meditative reflection on what medieval disaster writing can teach us about how to respond to the climate emergency.
 
When a series of ecological disasters swept medieval England, writers turned to religious storytelling for precedents. Their depictions of biblical floods, fires, storms, droughts, and plagues reveal an unsettled relationship to the natural world, at once unchanging and bafflingly unpredictable. In Apocalyptic Ecologies, Shannon Gayk traces representations of environmental calamities through medieval plays, sermons, and poetry such as Cleanness and Piers Plowman. In premodern disaster writing, she recovers a vision of environmental flourishing that could inspire new forms of ecological care today: a truly apocalyptic sensibility capable of seeing in every ending, every emergency a new beginning waiting to emerge.

William Delisle Hay’s The Doom of the Great City imagines the destruction of London as a result of human-induced environmental devastation, the threat of which is becoming increasingly visible today. This urban apocalypse narrative connects to pressing cultural discussions on global warming, modern life in cities, public health, and the interconnectivity of human life on earth. This first critical edition of Hay’s novella makes available his account of one man’s tale of survival amidst a toxic fog—a survival that includes his relocation to Maoriland in New Zealand. The editors foreground the relevance of the story to present and future pandemics, the persistence of environmental disasters, and the global population’s ongoing migration to cities. They place the narrative in dialogue with nineteenth-century concerns about climate change, pollution, natural resources, health care, empire, and (sub)urbanization that have remained significant challenges as we come to terms with the lasting impacts of the Anthropocene in the twenty-first century.

Although the reaction against Tennyson may have begun at his funeral, there is not doubt he was the central English poet of the nineteenth century as well as a fixture of the Victorian age—the fashioner of a public image that, in Tennyson’s case, bears a complex relation to the poetic imagination itself. Herbert Tucker provides a definitive account of the first half of Tennyson’s career, arguing that the poet self-consciously constructed his creative life in a dynamic balance with the work of his Romantic predecessors and with variously seductive and repellent features of Victorian culture.

Tucker narrates the life in Tennyson’s poems through a linked sequence of close readings, which supplement intrinsic interpretation of texts with considerations of Tennyson’s romantic allusiveness, generic experimentation, and aspiration to cultural spokesmanship. Explication of major poems from Tennyson’s formative years through the first decade of his unparalleled ascendancy illustrates the ways in which his original and pervasive sense of inevitability found developing expression, as a matter both of poetic form and of poetic argument. Tucker shows how Tennyson, through the authority of verbal craft that was his hallmark, consistently elaborated upon the fatalistic, intimate yet impersonal melancholy that was a source, and at length a result, of his prodigious public success.

Anyone interested in Victorian literature will read this book with profit, for it tells us a great deal not only about the preeminent Victorian poet but also about the cultural turn of mind that transformed Romanticism, during the second quarter of the nineteenth century, into a Victorian mode.