Inorganic Bodies, Longing to Become Organic: Hunger and Environment in Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution

Rudkin, Hayley

doi:10.1057/978-1-137-57337-7_11

Hayley Rudkin⁴

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture ((PNWC))

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Abstract

Hunger is a defining characteristic of revolutionary France in Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution: A History (1837). This chapter argues that by identifying revolutionary hunger as a point of crisis between a human society and the non-human environment that feeds it, Carlyle’s references to digestion extend beyond a purely social critique and necessitate an ecocritical reading. Many of Carlyle’s contemporaries, most notably Thomas Malthus, explored digestion as a focal point of humanity’s relationship with a non-human environment. This chapter explores Carlyle’s complication and dismissal of such materialist readings of this digestive exchange through his symbolic narration of “Hunger” as an autonomous feature of the revolutionary environment in its own right.

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Notes

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University of Sydney, Concord, NSW, Australia
Hayley Rudkin

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Hayley Rudkin
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University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Grace Moore
Monash University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Michelle J. Smith

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Rudkin, H. (2018). Inorganic Bodies, Longing to Become Organic: Hunger and Environment in Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution . In: Moore, G., Smith, M. (eds) Victorian Environments. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57337-7_11

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57337-7_11
Published: 08 March 2018
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-57336-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-57337-7
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