In the climactic finale to the first act of Oscar Wilde's 1895 play An Ideal Husband, Gertrude Chiltern convinces her husband, a Member of Parliament, not to support the construction of a boondoggle Argentinean canal. Gertrude, not her husband, is the ostensibly moral character here, since the canal's only purpose is to create wealth for its stockholders, but the language she uses in this impassioned speech quotes Guinevere, the contrite fallen wife in Alfred Tennyson's Idylls of the King. Near the end of the Idylls, recognizing that her infidelity has occasioned war, turmoil, and the end of Arthur's reign, Guinevere laments: Ah my God, What might I not have made of thy fair world, Had I but loved thy highest creature here? It was my duty to have loved the highest: It surely was my profit had I known: It would have been my pleasure had I seen. We needs must love the highest when we see it (G 649-56) Repeating these words and ideas under drastically different circumstances, Lady Chiltern tells her husband in the finale to Wilde's first act: I don't think you realise sufficiently, Robert, that you have brought into the political life of our time a nobler atmosphere, a finer attitude towards life, a freer air of purer aims and higher ideals - I know it, and for that I love you, Robert.. I will love you always, because you will always be worthy of love. We needs must love the highest when we see it! (Ideal 69).

Short essay on "Ecology" for special keywords issue

In Victorian studies, the term “extraction” helps us express the nineteenth-century emergence of a society fully reliant on finite underground materials and thereby describe the material and value relations at the heart of imperialism and at the heart of the provincial-metropole dynamic. Much of the recent attention to extraction in Victorian studies and beyond returns us to the sites of removal, to the extraction zones or sacrifice zones left behind when commodities of value are withdrawn, tallied, and sold. In Victorian literature, England's coal mines, copper mines, quarries, and other sites of extraction left a hefty footprint, but so did the British extractive industry that was increasingly moving to the colonial frontier. Written in the aftermath of the emergence of the first fossil-fuel-based society, Victorian literature is a crucial archive for understanding extractivism and how it was both normalized and challenged across the British imperial world.

The temporal structures of provincial realist novels set in extraction landscapes convey the new understanding of futurity that attended the nineteenth-century rise of an industrial system powered by a nonrenewable, diminishing stock of underground resources. Focusing on Joseph Conrad'sNostromo(1904), George Eliot'sThe Mill on the Floss(1860), and Fanny Mayne'sJane Rutherford; Or, the Miners' Strike(1853), this article demonstrates how these works adapt the provincial realist novel's emphasis on social renewal by way of marriage, reproduction, and inheritance to the extraction-based society of industrial Britain, undergirded by a trajectory of depletion and exhaustion rather than renewal. These works' deviation from novelistic chrononormativity expresses a new understanding of an extraction-based present that is claimed at the expense of future generations.