In Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (2013), Michael Marder posits that plants “are agents in the production of meaning” (35), echoing Jane Bennett’s claim that “the concept of agency [is enlarged] once nonhuman things are figured . . . as actors . . . [and] affective bodies forming assemblages” (Vibrant Matters 21-24).

Indeed, ecological imaginings of the floral/vegetal as agential species capable of meaning-making and action, and ready to revolt against (human) factors that seek to manipulate or degrade nature, can be found in nineteenth-century works such as Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826), John Ellor Taylor’s The Sagacity and Morality of Plants (1884), and Richard Jefferies’ After London; or, Wild England (1885). If as Elizabeth Chang explains, that the emergence of the natural sciences during the nineteenth century “explored several horrors at once: first, that the expanding nineteenth-century British natural world opened up new and unexpected plant dangers, second, a plant could be intentionally dangerous, and third, that a plant could have any kind of intentions at all” (“Killer Plants of the Late Nineteenth Century” 82), nineteenth-century literature—in representing the floral/vegetal as otherworldly and capable of revenge—also reveals deep anxieties of environmental degradation resulting from industrialization and imperialism.

This panel seeks submissions that examine floral/vegetal agency as represented in nineteenth-century British literature to a) explore various roles that plants play in either critiquing or thwarting human intention and/or b) to trace ways in which British writers of the period mediated the conflux of natural sciences, fear of the exotic other, and climate anxiety at home and abroad. More broadly, this panel also takes its cue from works such as Nathan K. Hensley and Philip Steer’s Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire (2018) to reinforce the ecological turn in Victorian Studies, and the kinds of questions it raises that recognize plants’ agency in helping us comprehend the scalar consequences of the Anthropocene.