Richard Jefferies, After London; or Wild England (Edinburgh Critical Editions of Nineteenth-Century Texts) - Softcover

Jefferies, Richard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1474441319 ISBN 13: 9781474441315

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press, 2018

Synopsis

Richard Jefferies' After London is uncanny and intriguing, an adventure story, quest romance, dystopia, and Darwinian novel rolled into one, but also a pioneering work of Victorian science fiction. Imagining a mysterious natural catastrophe that plunges its people into a barbaric future, Jefferies remarkable novel drowns and destroys London and depicts a challenging 'Wild England' dominated by nature and filled with evolved animals and devolved humans. Of its time but also distinctively modern, After London can, in its uneasy expression of Victorian and post-Victorian anxieties about industrial development, urbanisation, natural resources, and climate, be regarded as one of the first novels of the Anthropocene. This new critical edition provides one of the earliest examples of a global catastrophe novel that is part of a flowering of nineteenth-century science fiction. It situates After London in a tradition of mid-late Victorian texts that respond to the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace and responds to a host of other key social, political, and cultural issues of the period.

About this title

About the Author:

Mark Frost is affiliated with the University of Portsmouth.

About this edition

• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1474441319
• ISBN 13: 9781474441315
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256
• Editor: Frost Mark