Kluwick takes on a large topic with brio but also with careful attention. This is an unusually comprehensive and wide-ranging book, full of fresh insights about Victorian literature and culture.

Working at the confluence of ecocriticism, new materialism, and New Historicism, Haunting Ecologies explores the representation of aquatic matter in Victorian fiction and nonfiction, tracking how such texts articulate water’s uncanny ability to transgress and dissolve boundaries—especially boundaries between humans and their environment. Focusing on the inland waters of Victorian Britain—especially, but not exclusively, the Thames and its course through urbanized London—Kluwick emphasizes the agency of water, showcasing its abilities not only to connect physical bodies and watery environs but also to make (and unmake) sociopolitical categories and identities.

Ursula Kluwick’s Haunting Ecologies: Victorian Conceptions of Water is a joyful and profound exploration of the role of water in Victorian London, a subject at once so quotidian and so central to the literature, history, science, politics, and culture of the period. In keeping with the recent trend in ecocriticism to feature a single element or component of the environment, this text’s razor-sharp focus on water is anything but narrow. While certainly water—both within literary studies and in the larger discourse of the blue humanities—has always held profound symbolic value, Haunting Ecologies pushes the discussion further. 

Entwining critical frameworks of ecocriticism, new materialism, Blue Humanities, and trans-corporeality, Haunting Ecologies recognizes the potential of the Victorian novel to widen our approach to studying matter and its properties. It repositions the Victorian novel as a crucial archive of ecological anxiety, where matter refuses containment and proximate waters become transgressive agents of fear, decay, and death.