This essay argues that Leslie Marmon Silko's 1999 historical-fiction novel Gardens in the Dunes enables Indigenous-centered interventions into Victorian studies, ecocriticism, and their intersection. Dramatizing an animistic Native American view of nature as agentic and enspirited, Silko's novel critiques Victorian plant hunting as rooted in settler-colonial logic that treats nature as inert. In turn, through representations of late Victorian gardeners, Silko suggests that British horticulture was also informed by colonial and capitalist ways of thinking about plants. At the same time, however, the novel locates an animistic strain running through Victorian gardening discourses, which I demonstrate through readings of Victorian garden books depicting plants as agentic and enspirited. Silko, I argue, invites us to revisit the late nineteenth century as characterized by a cultural revival of animistic thought, even as this period also saw the racist stigmatization of animism in the field of Victorian anthropology. I connect this fraught discursive moment in British history to an inherited hesitation toward animism in contemporary Victorian studies and ecocriticism, a hesitation that has contributed to uneven engagement with Indigenous thought in both fields. In response, this essay explicates and emulates Silko's critical methodology for an undisciplining engagement with animism in white-authored, ecocritical Victorian studies.

This essay argues that Edwin Abbott's 1884 science fiction novel, Flatland, engages Victorian theological debates about the dimensionality of spiritual beings to reexamine the epistemological relationship between readers and literary characters. Liberal theologians at the fin de siècle turned to mathematical models of higher dimensions to reconcile the existence of immaterial spirits with a rational framework. Abbott's novel, set in a ghostly plane world populated only by polygons, imagines characters as analogous to spiritual forms in both their immateriality and their resistance to empirical modes of perception. Yet where theologians turned to higher dimensions to render immaterial entities scientifically knowable, Flatland uses its protagonist's higher-dimensional explorations to defamiliarize realism's techniques for making characters knowable—specifically, its spatialization of characters as beings with an accessible, dimensional interiority that grants readers a feeling of omniscience. Dismissing this omniscient relation to character as a posture that invites a dangerous epistemological complacency, Flatland uses its dimensional conceit to dramatize instead the strenuous imaginative work a reader must perform to temporarily inhabit a character's limited perspective—work that Abbott conceives as uniquely theological. For Abbott, theology thus acts not as a discourse of certainty and doctrinal closure but rather as a vital imaginative resource for rethinking fictional form.

This article explores the narrative functions of domestic accidents in Victorian fiction. Taking Charlotte Yonge's The Pillars of the House (1873) as a case study, it critically parses how popular fiction engaged with competing explanations of how or why accidents occur. As a new understanding of chance, risk, and statistical likelihood in the nineteenth century began to reshape the representation of accidents, narratives navigated shifting concepts of personal misfortune, of providence and poetic justice, as well as of probability. In Yonge's novel, domestic accidents demonstrate risk-management at home, promoting a concept that complicates narrative expectations both of divine punishment and of conventional conversion patterns.

In the epilogue to Serial Forms, Clare Pettitt identifies key elements of the “form” she investigates in her massively detailed, deeply original study:

Population was a socially significant yet politically precarious concept in nineteenth-century Britain. In order to highlight the affective implications of “population,” this essay examines Harriet Martineau's fiction in the context of early Victorian concerns over population growth and contemporary thoughts of political economy. As an avid supporter of Thomas Malthus, Martineau maintains that “proportionate labor” is the determining factor in national stability, but her use of sentimental fiction in Illustrations of Political Economy (1832–34) reveals aspects of the population crisis that are not accounted for by the classic political economists. Martineau's fiction presents population as a phenomenon collectively felt among Victorians rather than as an objective number that represents sociological truth. In her modification of the Malthusian principles to encompass affective negotiations that extend beyond individual morals, Martineau emphasizes the importance of somatic experience in shaping the nineteenth-century understanding of population. Furthermore, as Martineau's narrative resolution to the population crisis comes from well-managed emigration, her works demonstrate that geographical colonial expansion operated as an essential condition in establishing a nationally sustainable idea of population. Reassessing Martineau's literary and historical significance as an innovative successor of Malthus unveils a sophisticated Victorian nexus of population theory and the collective feelings of empire.

This article takes up the social production of race in nineteenth-century India through picaresque fiction. Through readings of Rudyard Kipling, Dion Boucicault, and W. M. Thackeray, it shows how picaresque form served as a specific mechanism of racial stabilization, a means of producing a consciously stopgap racial binary through the intervention of a third, triangulating racial term: Irishness. Understanding the triangular structure of whiteness’ “shapeshifting” brings into sharper relief the connections between three important scholarly foci regarding race in India: the ambiguous and fluid boundaries of Anglo-Indian whiteness, the belated assignment of “blackness” to native Indian populations, and the constant resignifications of Irish identity that demographic overrepresentation in India entailed. The case study of the picaresque reveals an imperialist culture more strategic and more self-aware about its own racial construction than is sometimes supposed; the genre served as a key means by which nonmetropolitan colonialist Victorians theorized and constructed their own relation to whiteness.