Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination (Hardcover)

Introduction: limited environments, fictions of escape; Part I. Thermodynamics and its Discontents: 1. The city and the sun; 2. The death of the sun at the dawn of the Anthropocene; Part II. Unsustainable Fictions: 3. Energy systems and narrative systems in Charles Dickens's Bleak House; 4. The renewable energies of Our Mutual Friend; 5. John Ruskin's alternative energy; 6. Personal fantasy, natural limits: Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; 7. Joseph Conrad: energy, entropy, and the fictions of empire; 8. Evolutionary energy and the future: Henry Maudsley and H. G. Wells; Bibliography.