Ecological Plot
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€100.99
Regular price
€107.99
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Sale price
€100.99
2025 ASLE Ecocritical Book Award Finalist
A01=John MacNeill Miller
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
Aldo Leopold
Author_John MacNeill Miller
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Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=DSB
Category=PDX
Category=WN
character
Charles Darwin
community
COP=United States
Darwinism
Delivery_Pre-order
disciplines
ecocriticism
ecology
economics
Elizabeth Gaskell
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=0
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_science
ethics
George Eliot
Harriet Martineau
history of ideas
history of science
humanity
interconnectedness
interdependent communities
Language_English
literary history
literary studies
literature and science
literature and the environment
narrative storytelling
nature
nineteenth century
objectivity
PA=Not yet available
political economy
Price_€50 to €100
PS=Forthcoming
Rachel Carson
realist fiction
realist novel
setting
softlaunch
species
theory of the novel
Thomas Hardy
Thomas Robert Malthus
twentieth century
Victorian
Victorian literature
Product details
- ISBN 9780813951775
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 24 Sep 2024
- Publisher: University of Virginia Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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Unraveling the surprising history of the concept of ecology
The Ecological Plot traces the roots of this most mainstream branch of science back to an unexpected source: narrative storytelling. Weaving together the histories of different disciplines, John MacNeill Miller shows how pioneering thinkers drew on a shared set of literary techniques to imagine how different species could work together as a single, interdependent community, redefining the way we conceptualize the natural world.
Beginning with a series of revolutionary exchanges between the political economist Thomas Robert Malthus, the writer Harriet Martineau, and the naturalist Charles Darwin, The Ecological Plot identifies the foundations of modern notions of ecology, economics, and realist fiction, maps how they evolved through the works of Victorian writers such as Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy, and shows how they resurfaced in the works of Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson a century later.
Miller’s book reveals why our most sophisticated efforts to explain humanity’s relationship to nature have been segregated into different disciplines and makes an argument for the importance of bringing these separate ways of understanding the world back together as a crucial step toward solving the environmental, economic, and ethical problems of the present.
The Ecological Plot traces the roots of this most mainstream branch of science back to an unexpected source: narrative storytelling. Weaving together the histories of different disciplines, John MacNeill Miller shows how pioneering thinkers drew on a shared set of literary techniques to imagine how different species could work together as a single, interdependent community, redefining the way we conceptualize the natural world.
Beginning with a series of revolutionary exchanges between the political economist Thomas Robert Malthus, the writer Harriet Martineau, and the naturalist Charles Darwin, The Ecological Plot identifies the foundations of modern notions of ecology, economics, and realist fiction, maps how they evolved through the works of Victorian writers such as Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy, and shows how they resurfaced in the works of Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson a century later.
Miller’s book reveals why our most sophisticated efforts to explain humanity’s relationship to nature have been segregated into different disciplines and makes an argument for the importance of bringing these separate ways of understanding the world back together as a crucial step toward solving the environmental, economic, and ethical problems of the present.
John MacNeill Miller is Associate Professor of English at Allegheny College.
