Maura Coughlin - Ecocriticism and the Anthropocene in Nineteenth-Century Art and Visual Culture

In this volume, emerging and established scholars bring ethical and political concerns for the environment, nonhuman animals and social justice to the study of nineteenth-century visual culture. They draw their theoretical inspiration from the vitality of emerging critical discourses, such as new materialism, ecofeminism, critical animal studies, food studies, object-oriented ontology and affect theory. This timely volume looks back at the early decades of the Anthropocene to query the agency of visual culture to critique, create and maintain more resilient and biologically diverse local and global ecologies.

Maura Coughlin is Professor of Visual Studies at Bryant University, USA.

Emily Gephart is Lecturer in the Department of Visual and Material Studies at Tufts University, USA.

Cover image: Designed by Theodore Russell Davis, made by Haviland & Co., Limoges, France, Fish Service Platter The Shad, c. 18801887. Porcelain with chromolithograph, enamel, and gilt decoration, 9 24 1/2 inches, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of the McNeil Americana Collection, 2006.

This series is our home for innovative research in the fields of art and visual studies. It includes monographs and targeted edited collections that provide new insights into visual culture and art practice, theory, and research.

Play and the Artists Creative Process
The Work of Philip Guston and Eduardo Paolozzi
Elly Thomas

Film and Modern American Art
The Dialogue between Cinema and Painting
Katherine Manthorne

Bridging Communities through Socially Engaged Art
Edited by Alice Wexler and Vida Sabbaghi

Abstract Painting and the Minimalist Critiques
Robert Mangold, David Novros, and Jo Baer in the 1960s
Matthew L. Levy

Arte Ambientale, Urban Space, and Participatory Art
Martina Tanga

Theory of the Art Object
Paul Crowther

The Digital Interface and New Media Art Installations
Phaedra Shanbaum

Ecocriticism and the Anthropocene in Nineteenth-Century Art and Visual Culture
Edited by Maura Coughlin and Emily Gephart

Popularization and Populism in the Visual Arts
Attraction Images
Edited by Anna Schober

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Advances-in-Art-and-Visual-Studies/book-series/RAVS

First published 2020

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The right of Maura Coughlin and Emily Gephart to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Coughlin, Maura, editor. | Gephart, Emily, editor.

Title: Ecocriticism and the anthropocene in nineteenth-century art and visual culture / edited by Maura Coughlin and Emily Gephart.

Description: New York: Routledge, 2020. | Series: [Routledge advances in art and visual studies] | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2019025477 (print) | LCCN 2019025478 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367180287 (hardback) | ISBN 9780429059193 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Art and societyHistory19th century. | Ecocriticism.

Classification: LCC N72.S6 E29 2020

ISBN: 978-0-367-18028-7 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-429-05919-3 (ebk)

Typeset in Sabon

by codeMantra

Alan C. Braddock is Ralph H. Wark Associate Professor of Art History & American Studies, and Director of Graduate Studies in the American Studies Program at The College of William & Mary. He is the author of Thomas Eakins and the Cultures of Modernity (2009) and coeditor of A Keener Perception: Ecocritical Studies in American Art History (2009, with Christoph Irmscher) and A Greene Country Towne: Philadelphias Ecology in the Cultural Imagination (2016, with Laura Turner Igoe). He is also the co-curator and co-author, with Karl Kusserow, of Natures Nation: American Art and Environment (20182019), a book and traveling exhibition organized by the Princeton University Art Museum. His essay From Nature to Ecology: The Emergence of Ecocritical Art History appears in The Blackwell Companion to American Art (2015), edited by John Davis, Jennifer Greenhill and Jason LaFountain. In 20162017, Braddock was the Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron Visiting Professor of Environment and Humanities at Princeton. He has taught interdisciplinary courses on American art and environmental history, ecocriticism and animal studies since 2002.

Kelly P. Bushnell is Visiting Instructor in the Department of English at the University of West Florida. Her research focuses on oceans and animals in Victorian literature, particularly whales, whaling and material culture. Recent publications include the Oxford Bibliography of Victorian Maritime Literature, a state-of-the-field article on oceanic studies for Victorian Literature and Culture and chapters on early cetacean captivity and Tennysons sense of aquaria, respectively. She has been the environmental humanities scholar aboard an all-women expedition to the Canadian High Arctic and Greenland, and her current project, co-authored with Inuk Traditional Knowledge Keeper Johnny Issaluk, considers ecological agency and colonialism in the Arctic. She lives just a short ferry ride from Seattle and teaches remotely.

Maura Coughlin is Professor of Visual Studies in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at Bryant University in Smithfield, RI, and is Vice President of the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association. Her research is focused on French Atlantic visual culture, coastal ecology, the rise of marine sciences in France and dialogues that have been struck between nineteenth- and twenty-first-century aesthetics and ecological ethics. Across her projects is a shared fascination with the material flows of fish and animals, seaweed, salt, people, sand, stones, boats and other actors that move across and through the tide line, and the ways in which the visual culture of the shore visualizes intensely local perceptions of tide, geology, beach morphology and marine botany.

Emily Gephart is a Lecturer in the Department of Visual and Material Studies at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. Her work explores the ecological networks of mind in the long nineteenth century and addresses how material objects served as tools through which beholders comprehended discoveries about modern psychology, perception and aesthetics. Her work has appeared in the Routledge anthology