Victorian materialisms: approaching nineteenth-century matter

ABSTRACT

In this introduction to the special issue Victorian Materialisms, the authors review the material turn in cultural and literary studies, foregrounding the necessity of more historical nuance. While new materialist accounts tend to stress the post-Enlightenment persistence of dualistic oppositions between nature and culture, humans and nonhumans, body and mind, the editors of this special issue argue that Victorian conceptions of matter reveal a wide range of materialisms that anticipate current new materialist interventions. Closer attention to nineteenth-century cultural, literary, philosophical, and scientific approaches to matter, the authors submit, uncovers not just anxiety about boundary breaches, but a widespread interest in material agency and the entanglement of animal, chemical, human, plant, and inorganic matter. The introduction suggests that a broader enquiry into Victorian materialisms beyond canonical figures and texts helps recuperate the pervasiveness and mundaneness of Victorian engagements with matter and material agency.

KEYWORDS:

• Victorian
• materialism
• matter
• literature
• material culture
• new materialism
• environmental humanities

Matter inevitably matters. Bodies and environments are in constant flux, engaged in processes of de- and re-composition, inter- and intra-actions, recombination and entanglements. As Diana Coole and Samantha Frost ask in the introduction to New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (2010): “In light of this massive materiality, how could we be anything other than materialist? How could we ignore the power of matter and the ways it materializes in our ordinary experiences or fail to acknowledge the primacy of matter in our theories?” (1). New materialist theorists tend to coalesce around the argument that post-Enlightenment philosophical enquiry has, however, done just that: the human has been uprooted from a material universe declared to be “passive stuff, […] raw, brute, or inert” (Bennett 2010, vii), distanced from “mere nature” (Latour 1993, 137), and invested with intellect, life, and transcendence in opposition to mechanistically conceived lifeless matter. As Elizabeth Grosz contends: “The thing has, in the West, always been conceived as the passive, inert, unresisting other or counterpart to the subject, consciousness, or mind, that is, as matter, substance, or noumena. The thing is that against which mind is understood, its other or object” (2002, 78). The longevity of dualist thinking and human exceptionalism and the consequences of anthropocentrism are undeniable in view of sweeping biodiversity loss, species extinction, mass deforestation, ocean acidification, the relentless depletion of natural resources, and an accelerating climate crisis. Yet the new materialist narrative tends to stress the persistence of dualism at the expense of historical nuance. Emphasis on the “radical revisions of our ideas about the description of physical entities, chemical and biological processes, and their ethical, political, and cultural implications” (Oppermann 2014, 21) can obscure the tenacity of previous challenges to dualist thinking. Critics’ plea for the “massive materiality” that humans share with animals, plants, and things is not without precursors.

Quite the opposite, as Terry Eagleton asserts: “From Epicurus to the Enlightenment, Spinoza to neuroscience, the concept of materialism has a venerable history” (2019, v). That this history also encompasses engagements with material agency is implied, for instance, in the questions asked by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert in their introduction to Elemental Ecocriticism (2015): “How did we forget that matter is a precarious system and dynamic entity, not a reservoir of tractable commodities? How did we cease to know that earth, air, fire, and water move, rebel, ally, crush, and desire?” (5). If, as they suggest, the dynamism of matter was consigned to oblivion in Western intellectual traditions, material agency had evidently once been accepted as a natural given. Cohen and Duckert, in fact, trace this back as far as Empedocles in the fifth century BC (2), and thus even further than Eagleton. However, as their formulation also indicates, human economic and technological development is, at the same time, a history of loss, a disappearance of awareness of the ubiquity of material agency.

The Victorian age is a key period in this history as an era in which the agency, composition, durability, dynamics, and origins of matter were fiercely debated in scientific investigations and pondered in artistic and literary explorations of materiality. Even though “nineteenth-century discussions about the ontological status of humans, inorganic matter, and machines live on in assessments of our own ‘posthuman condition,’” as Katharina Boehm argues (2012, 10), the Victorians are hardly considered trailblazers for new materialist concerns. While the Enlightenment is often associated with the consolidation of “nature-culture, human-nonhuman, animate-inanimate binaries” (Barad 2007, 171), dualist thinking became increasingly tenuous in the course of nineteenth-century philosophical enquiries into the inextricability of organic and inorganic matter, or bodies and minds.

This special issue shines a spotlight on Victorian conceptions of matter and materiality. Its aim is to retrace materialist thinking in nineteenth-century British and imperial contexts. Challenging the adage that “materialism has remained a sporadic and often marginal approach” (Coole and Frost 2010, 1) in the Western history of philosophy, the articles collected in this issue investigate the astonishingly wide range of Victorian materialisms that is manifest in autobiographical, philosophical, poetic, prose, and scientific writing, as well as in various cultural, curative, and scientific practices. While new materialist scholars commonly trace their lines of investigation back to nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century thinkers (Bennett 2010; Grosz 2010; Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012), the broad extent to which Victorian science and literature anticipate new materialist approaches has only begun to be addressed. A recent collection, which appeared at the same time as our call for papers, resorts to precisely this formulation in its title: Jo Carruthers, Nour Dakkak, and Rebecca Spence’s Anticipatory Materialisms in Literature and Philosophy, 1790–1930 (2019) concurs with the aims of our own special issue. It highlights “the lively debates about the agency and force of matter taking place within the literature of the Romantic, Victorian and Modern periods that are under threat of being overlooked or overwritten by the claim of newness inherent within the recent turn to materiality” (2019, 1). In its focus, Anticipatory Materialisms is both broader than this special issue (including the Romantic and the Modern in addition to the Victorian) and narrower (since our focus is less exclusively literary). However, both our collections share the basic urge to investigate the wide array of nineteenth-century materialities. Paying specific attention to the conceptual and physical entanglements between animal, human, metallic, plant, and textile matter, the articles collected in this special issue trace the continuities and intersections between Victorian and new materialisms. Rather than merely applying new materialist concepts and reading strategies to prior texts, therefore, we aim, to adopt Carruthers, Dakkak, and Spence’s succinct phrase, “to read forwards, rather than backwards” (3). Thus we are interested in examining how Victorian conceptions and experiences of matter can be read as preparing, prefiguring, or even pre-empting, new materialisms.

This special issue investigates how Victorian interrogations of the boundaries between human and nonhuman as well as active and passive matter pave the way for contemporary conceptualisations of materiality. A list of possible examples immediately comes to mind. If the new materialist ontology “sees its task as creating new concepts and images of nature that affirm matter’s immanent vitality” (Coole and Frost 2010, 8), for instance, botanist Robert Brown can assist in that endeavour: observing particles of dried plant pollen submerged in water under the microscope, Brown famously stumbled upon the “very unexpected fact of seeming vitality” (1828, 340) in what his contemporaries perceived as dead, inert matter.¹ To speculate on another possible elective affinity, Jane Bennett’s theory of vital materialism, which strives to render the “relationship between matter and life as close as it possibly can be” (2010, 49), may owe a debt to Thomas H. Huxley’s provocative determination of protoplasm as the “Physical Basis of Life” in 1869. Submitting that “matter and life are inseparably connected,” Huxley appalled many of his contemporaries by claiming that “there is some one kind of matter which is common to all living beings” (1869, 129) – humans, accordingly, share their essential substance with animals, plants, and other natural phenomena. This assertion, of course, was in line with some of the fundamental challenges to received intellectual traditions in the period that exposed “the messiness of the categories of human and nonhuman” (Carruthers, Dakkak, and Spence 2019, 10). As Rosi Braidotti states, “Freud’s and Darwin’s insights about the structure of subjectivity opened up a profound inhumanness at the heart of the subject” (2009, 528). And the challenges constituted by these findings were pervasive. However, very few Victorian scientists are held responsible for “the great humiliation of the human” most commonly traced through Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud, even though the work of Henry Maudsley, George Henry Lewes, and others crucially paved the way for the human acknowledgement that “we are not in the center of the universe” (Morton 2013, 16, 18).² For instance, in his “Theory of Vitality,” Maudsley argues that all life is organised according to a “certain definite plan,” but, contrary to expectation, he explicitly does not attribute this plan to divine design: “The plan is the law of the matter; and the law is not something outside the matter, but it is inherent in it” (1873, 290). Finally, as S. Pearl Brilmyer reminds us, two prominent popular attempts to explain character relied on materialism: “pseudosciences like phrenology and physiognomy approached character as a fixed constant or predetermined unfolding of biological matter” (2015, 63).

In light of such pleas for the vital, all-encompassing, and agential powers of matter, one might wonder, to take up Coole and Frost’s question, how the Victorians could have been “anything other than materialist.” And yet, the shock value of some of the above-mentioned discoveries indicates that Victorian materialists were writing against profound resistance from scholarly and clerical quarters. Both Huxley and Maudsley defend themselves against the “imputation of materialism” (Maudsley 1873, 322) put forward in the Archbishop of York’s address on “The Limits of Philosophical Inquiry” to the members of the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution in 1868. Huxley pre-empts being accused of “gross and brutal materialism” by assuring his readers that he is “no materialist” and, in fact, holds “materialism to involve grave philosophical error” (1869, 141). Yet he finds scathing words for those who “watch what they conceive to be the progress of materialism, in such fear and powerless anger,” afraid that the “advancing tide of matter threatens to drown their souls” (143). Maudsley echoes this critique, but he chooses more conciliatory tones:

What an unnecessary horror hangs over the word materialism! It has an ugly sound, and an indefinite meaning, and is well suited, therefore, to be set up as a sort of moral scarecrow; but if it be closely examined, it will be found to have the semblance of something terrible, and to be empty of any real harm. In the assertion that mind is altogether a function of matter, there is no more actual irreverence than in asserting that matter is the realization of mind; the one and the other proposition being equally meaningless so far as they postulate a knowledge of anything more than phenomena. (1873, 324)

Gross, brutal, terrible – the “advancing tide of matter” threatened to challenge cherished conceptions of the superiority of an immaterial mind over the baseness of matter and thus call into question God’s design of human beings for higher purposes. Hence, in order to avoid censure, writers could only expound materialist theories while dis-identifying from them at the same time.

These rhetorical manoeuvres continue to deflect scholarly attention from the tremendous contributions that Victorian writers, scientific and literary alike, made to an emerging understanding of humans’ lateral relations and close imbrications with a vital material universe. It is notable that, when scholars of the Victorian period address materialist thinking, they often reproduce the negative connotations that writers such as Maudsley tried their best to shed. While it is undoubtedly true that most nineteenth-century writers worked hard to repudiate “the charge of materialism” (Sleigh 2017, 79) or to avert classifications of their work as “rank materialism and atheism” (Smith 2017, 141), the current scholarly interest in all things material, and the optimistic reframing of the vitality of matter, encourages us to look beyond these controversies. This also requires us, as Tyson Stolte submits, to put into perspective “the triumphalist rhetoric of those who sought to divide” religion and science and to re-examine “our own confidence about the anxiety produced among the orthodox by scientific naturalism” in the mid-nineteenth century (2021, 372, 371). For Stolte, the dominant narrative which highlights controversy about and resistance to materialism to some extent also “represents its own form of misreading – a failure to […] recognize a widespread comfort at mid-century with what seems to us like the most radically reductionist Victorian science, even among those who otherwise held to orthodox religious belief” (371).

This special issue aims to recuperate the pervasiveness and, in a sense, the mundaneness, of Victorian engagements with matter and material agency. This involves excavating the productive, and often optimistic, discussions of materiality and materialism that abound in Victorian science, literature, and culture. Important precursors to the perspective proposed here are Gillian Beer’s (2000) and Janis McLarren Caldwell’s (2004) accounts of romantic materialism, William Cohen’s (2009) analysis of materialist theories of embodiment, Boehm’s (2012) emphasis on Victorian entanglements of subjects and objects, or Bodies and Things, Pamela K. Gilbert’s (2019) investigation of materialist re-evaluations of the body’s sensate surface as the locus of subjectivity, Benjamin Morgan’s (2017) analysis of materialist aesthetics as an intersection of bodies, minds, and matter, and Brilmyer’s (2015, 2022) explorations of a material characterology. Like Stolte, William Cohen helpfully gestures to critical avenues beyond dichotomous framings that pit “rank” or “radical” materialism against idealism, humanism, or spirituality and narrowly equate it with atheism or reductivism. As Cohen demonstrates, attending to the “materialist aspects” of literary – and, one might add, scientific – works is “not to attempt to capture them in their totality; rather, it is to address their counternormative energy, to draw out those elements that seem to push against a beneficent humanism” (2009, 131). Scholars including Beer, Boehm, Brilmyer, Caldwell, Gilbert, and Morgan have also modelled approaches that trace materialist theories, plots, aesthetics, concepts, images, and methods of characterisation across different modes of nineteenth-century writing. With the aim of examining the broad canvas of materialist positions in the Victorian age, this special issue builds on this existing scholarship yet significantly extends the canon of writers that can be affiliated with materialism.³ While well-known materialist thinkers such as John Tyndall, Huxley, and Brown make their appearances, our contributors uncover the previously overlooked conceptions of materialism proposed by botanist Charles Anderson, poet-philosopher Constance Naden, and dermatologist Erasmus Wilson, and they illuminate hitherto unacknowledged materialist strains in the poetry, novels, short stories, and autobiography of Robert Browning, Wilkie Collins, Alice Perrin, and Mary Seacole.

Through a discussion of various and often conflicting versions of Victorian materialisms – the plural matters here – this special issue emphasises the plurality and polyphony of materialist approaches in the nineteenth century. Philosophers and poets, botanists and medical writers, and authors of autobiographies and novels explored, tested, refuted, and expanded materialist notions of the primacy and vitality of matter, sometimes shifting gear within a single work or oeuvre. Although the special issue highlights these multiple perspectives and complexities, the account of Victorian materialisms it can provide is necessarily limited. Specifically, rather than focusing on the various schools and movements one might associate with materialism (such as historical, radical, and romantic materialism), most of our contributors are interested in exploring how different forms of materiality came to matter to particular Victorian writers. They engage with algae (Garascia), herbal plants (Leetsch), fabric and cosmetic texture (Hartl), skin (Mathieson), and human hair (Hind), amongst other substances, and examine specific practices of collecting, preserving, probing, using, and writing about these diverse materialities. But through them, they also address broader concerns relating to colonial and black ecology (Leetsch), littoral space (Garascia), gender and economy (Hind), the relation between dualism and imperialism (Agnew), the boundaries of human subjects (Mathieson), the interrelatedness of human and more-than-human spheres (Huber), and the connections between texture, character, and literary structure (Hartl).

As Karen Barad insists, “an integral part of questioning the constitution of the nature-culture dichotomy and the work it does [is]: not only that it matters, but how it matters and for whom” (2007, 87; original emphasis). It is important to stress that the “readings forwards” offered by the contributors to this special issue persistently place the objects, materials, and forms of matter, as well as the attitudes to materiality and materialism which they discuss, in cultural, social, and political terms. They are careful to historicise and contextualise, implicitly responding to what Simon Choat sketches as one of the main problems of new as opposed to historical materialism: its tendency to ahistorical and what Marx calls “crude materialism,” which regards the properties of objects as inherent, and hence natural and stable (Choat 2018, 1037).⁴ Arjun Appadurai reminds us of the necessity to consider “the conditions under which economic objects” – or things, more broadly – “circulate in different regimes of value in space and time” (1986, 3; original emphasis), even if critics aspire to decentre human transactions and “follow the things themselves” (5; see also Brown 2001, 6). While claims such as Eagleton’s, who contends that new materialism “tends to take the pain out of matter […] by converting it into a vital, protean, mercurial, free-floating force” (2019, viii), are exaggerated and apparently ignore work that attends to the racialised, classed, and gendered dynamics and injustices of material practices,⁵ the need to historicise is beyond dispute. The articles collected in this special issue embrace this need and meticulously trace the meanings of matter and material agency in conversation with cultural, political, and social context, specific circumstances, and the various actants involved.

The articles that follow explore the myriad ways in which Victorian novelists, philosophers, poets, scientists, and cultural commentators engaged and attempted to come to terms with the material world and its relation to humanity. In doing so, the essays collected here also contribute to different critical fields which are related to new materialism or share with it lines of enquiry, such as postcolonial studies, critical plant studies, the medical, the environmental, and the blue humanities. The special issue opens with a focus on nonhuman matter and material entanglements with Ann Garascia’s analysis of botanist Charles Anderson’s herbarium Sea Mosses (1873–1875). Garascia examines Anderson’s work as a material site of ecological archival production and interpretation, as an example of what she calls “the littoral book” – an album that both results from and reflects the human-nonhuman interconnectivities of oceanic archiving. Her contribution considers the creation of the handmade herbarium (the process of collecting specimen and preservation techniques, such as floating out), the final Victorian product (questions of ordering, evidence of the unfinished state of the album), and its current condition (pieces of detached seaweed that move across the pages of the herbarium) in order to formulate a complex transhistorical theory of the ecological archive. Bringing together book history with material ecocriticism and a blue humanities perspective, Garascia’s analysis of Sea Mosses throws light on how Victorian botanist practices turned the book of nature from a figurative concept into a lively material object that continues to offer insights into oceanic memory.

Jennifer Leetsch’s article on Mary Seacole’s 1857 autobiography Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands shares Garascia’s vegetal focus but ties this in with a postcolonial perspective. Positioning her approach to one of the most widely discussed individual voices of black feminist studies within the new field of critical plant studies, Leetsch places Seacole’s engagement with plants and herbal medicine within a larger history of Black Atlantic human-plant routes. The article examines three medicinal plants as concrete examples of the interaction between human and herbal matter, conceptualising them as “human-vegetal entanglements” that indicate shared embodied experiences. Thus Leetsch links vegetal materiality with the medical and botanical histories of slavery, the plantation, and resistant black ecologies to explore how a network of plants deeply implicated in colonial trade could nevertheless also enable Seacole’s self-fashioning as a healer of the British nation.

Éadaoin Agnew’s contribution similarly engages with colonial contexts and relations. In her discussion of Anglo-Indian writer Alice Perrin’s short story collection East of Suez (1901), Agnew demonstrates how new materialist readings can uncover resistance to patriarchal and imperial authority. Extending previous interpretations of Perrin’s work in terms of the colonial gothic, Agnew attends to the relationships between human bodies, plants, and animals. The article elaborates how Perrin, through the use of imperial and imperious characters, exposes the fallacy of dualistic views of human and nonhuman nature: due to fatal misjudgements of their superiority over or aloofness from the Indian flora and fauna, Perrin’s protagonists are devoured by alligators or attacked by the tigers, rats, and biscobras whose habitats they have invaded. As Agnew argues, Perrin’s work thus alerts readers to the vitality, sentience, and agency of the indigenous natural world and the need to develop ecologically sensible relations with it.

Irmtraud Huber’s re-examination of Constance Naden’s hylo-idealism also engages with dualism, specifically with one Victorian writer’s attempt to overcome it. Huber reads the radical monism of this neglected poet-philosopher, whose oeuvre has only recently received new attention by feminist scholars, in relation to her poetry. She argues, however, that Naden’s literary works ought not to be regarded as direct reflections of hylo-idealism but as a different, aesthetically inflected engagement with her own philosophical positions; they are hence part and parcel of her material-idealist project and her challenge to dualism. Huber pays specific attention to the ways in which Naden shifts the solipsistic emphasis of her mentor, Robert Lewins, towards a philosophy based on material interrelations. As Huber productively suggests, new materialism would profit from attention to such precursors, particularly in its grappling with what she identifies as one of its key challenges, namely the need to formulate a new materialist basis for a new ethics.

The final three contributions all focus on the human body itself as a material assemblage. Anja Hartl’s article on the role of texture in Wilkie Collins’s No Name (1862) examines an array of surfaces, substances, and layers (such as clothes, wigs, and make-up) as the stuff in and through which human transformation is worked. Drawing on the textural analyses pioneered in queer studies, Hartl proposes texture as a productive critical tool for Victorian material culture studies. She shows that the multi-layered, textural assessments that Collins applies to his characters complicate binary notions of surface versus depth, or internal versus external structures. In Hartl’s innovative reading of the novel, the protagonist’s grappling with (il)legitimacy is not only an urgent social or legal question, but an experience lived, contested, and registered through material strategies and textures. Texture emerges as both an attribute of bodies, materials, and things and an interpretive tool to unravel the novel’s complex engagement with materiality.

Charlotte Mathieson’s contribution similarly applies a textural lens to the human body. Her article analyses descriptions of sunburnt and tanned skin in a wide range of texts drawn from the Victorian literary canon as well as from hitherto neglected dermatological sources. Mathieson identifies two representational patterns in descriptions of suntan and sunburn: the first articulates the vulnerability of the human body to environmental influences (such as sunrays) and thus emphasises the instability and permeability of the skin; the second, in turn, stabilises the skin as the body’s boundary by likening the cutaneous covering to solid matter (such as bronze, copper, and mahogany). Across these representations, Mathieson brings into view a fascinating facet of the Victorians’ material imagination: as abundant literary and medical references to the human skin’s likeness to material objects evince, the Victorians understood their bodies as closely interrelated – and sometimes even barely distinguishable – from the material world surrounding them.

The extent to which material objects can be extracted from the human body and imbued with sentimental or monetary value is discussed in further detail by Heather Hind. Our final contributor investigates hair as an “unrealised source of credit” in Robert Browning’s poem “Gold Hair” (1864). While Browning’s poetic representations of hair have often been read in symbolic and erotic terms, Hind makes a compelling case for reading the poem’s evocation of hair and hairwork literally. In restoring the neglected history of so-called hair harvests to critical discussions of the poem, and by analysing it alongside exhibits from the Brownings’ collection of hair and hairwork, Hind elicits the material significance and potentiality of hair in the Victorian imaginary. As her article delineates, hair in particular – and, to some extent, the human body in general – could be figured as a material to be processed, refined, exchanged, and consumed. Her analysis is also, to some extent, a culmination of the central concerns of this issue, particularly in its troubling of the boundaries between human and nonhuman objects in Victorian material culture. Hind’s argument that the human body in the Victorian period not only engaged in processes of production and consumption but could itself figure as a workable material resource, capable of moving and spreading beyond the apparent borders of the human subject, extends to the contemporary moment and the rapidly growing awareness of the sheer extent of human-nonhuman enmeshment. As our material environment emerges as, precisely, not nonhuman but more-than-human (Abram 1997), we might do well to remember the multifaceted creative and practical ways in which our Victorian precursors attempted to come to terms with this astonishingly, dauntingly, and wonderfully entangled world. In spite of the Victorians’ careful attempts to control “the more-than-human world by making it indexable, cross-referenceable, and interpretable” (Garascia in this special issue), the animals, body parts, fabrics, metals, and plants traced across the contributions that follow just as often defy, upset, and twist human taxonomies and textual containment.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank our contributors, who have been flawlessly reliable and considerate in meeting tight deadlines in the midst of a global pandemic. We would also like to express our sincere thanks to Michael Franz and Charley Sophia Sitter at the University of Bern for their careful corrections of the final manuscript, as well as to Sandra Dinter, Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou, Zoë Lehmann Imfeld, and Virginia Richter for their valuable comments on this introduction. Many thanks also go to the general editors of the European Journal of English Studies, Greta Olson, Isabel Carrera Suárez, and Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou, for their helpful guidance. We are also very grateful to Henrik R. Lassen and Roy Sellars for sharing their thoughts on Victorian raw materials and environmental hazards with us.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

Ursula Kluwick’s research for this article was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF).

Notes on contributors

Ariane de Waal

Ariane de Waal is an Assistant Professor at the Department of English and North American Studies at MLU Halle-Wittenberg, Germany. Her research focuses on British literature and culture of the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. She is the author of Theatre on Terror: Subject Positions in British Drama (De Gruyter 2017). Her postdoctoral project investigates the epistemological intersections of dermatological writing and the Victorian realist novel. She has published and forthcoming work on medical and literary discussions of skin in Victorian Network (2020) and in the collection Medicine and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, History, and Culture (Palgrave Macmillan 2022).

Ursula Kluwick

Ursula Kluwick is Senior Researcher in the SNSF Project “The Beach in the Long Twentieth Century” at the Department of English of the University of Bern, Switzerland. Among her main research interests are British and Anglophone literatures and cultures, with a specific focus on the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, postcolonial studies, non-realist forms of writing, and the environmental, especially the blue, humanities. Her books include Exploring Magic Realism in Salman Rushdie’s Fiction (Routledge 2011) and The Beach in Anglophone Literatures and Cultures (edited with Virginia Richter; Ashgate 2015). She is currently finalising a monograph on Victorian water writing.

Notes

1. His influential discovery has become known as Brownian motion, or movement. As S. Pearl Brilmyer elaborates, “Brown’s contemporaries were skeptical when he claimed to have observed the ‘very unexpected fact of seeming vitality’ in things that were neither alive nor organic. As a result, his theory that matter was not fundamentally inert, but rather composed of tiny, dancing particles, went unnoticed for more than thirty years, that is, until the late 1860s” (2015, 62).

2. Inevitably, any such “list of humiliators” (Morton 2013, 16) is incomplete and reflects the biases of a Western intellectual history composed of paradigm shifts instituted by white male European philosophers.

3. In this respect, our special issue also significantly departs from Anticipatory Materialisms, with which it shares much conceptual ground. While this earlier collection concentrates on canonical figures, our own special issue shows how the lively debates about matter and materialism extended beyond the illuminated stage of the Victorian canon and into the slightly more obscure nooks and crannies of Victorian writing.

4. An analysis of the relation between these two important schools of materialism, historical and new, is, unfortunately, beyond the scope of this special issue. For an illuminating juxtaposition of the two, see Choat (2018); for a synthesis of historical and new materialist thinking through the concept of Transcultural Materialism, see Hoyos (2019).

5. That material practices can cause pain and suffering is explored in Stacy Alaimo’s examination of the intersections of class and environment with bodily matter (2010, 27–59), Braidotti’s reconceptualisation of “our relationship to pain, loss, and practices of mourning” in terms of a biopolitical and materialist understanding of the body (2010, 201), and Astrida Neimanis’s analysis of toxic matter in the “intercorporeal flows of breast milk” (2017, 32–40).