Title: Review: Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire, edited by Nathan K. Hensley and Philip Steer
Abstract: in Romola is not a flaw resulting from commitment to Evangelical doctrine, but an effect consistent with the novel's suspicion of coherent patterning itself, as evident in the fatal theorizing of Baldassare and Tito as in the theology of Savonarola (p.202).It might further place this effect more accurately in the context of nineteenth-century literature by showing how Romola's "breakdown of novelistic structure," rather than having "no apparent equivalent in the fiction of the times" (p.202), belongs to the tradition of anti-coherence that Adelene Buckland identifies in Novel Science: Fiction and the Invention of Nineteenth-Century Geology (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2013), and that Romola demonstrates to be a part of religious as well as scientific discourse.Despite my skepticism of the larger claims of Evangelical Gothic and its specific approach to Eliot, I find that reading it alongside recent scholarship raises intriguing questions.Readers interested in the relationship between secularity and models of agency will find value in the account of the conflict between "personal moral agency" and systems in Bleak House (p.155).Readers interested in religions beyond Evangelicalism might connect this study's elaboration of Evangelical blood imagery and vampires to related imagery surrounding Jews and Catholics in nineteenth-century literature.Combining Evangelical Gothic's surprising analyses of fiction with recent work in nineteenth-century literary religious studies thus presents further avenues for exploration.