The Novel and the Environment: Nature, Cultivation, and Alien Ecologies

Eighteenth-century novels describe a range of different environments. This chapter offers an overview of the ways in which the “normative” ecological conditions in England both shaped, and were shaped by, depictions of alien ecologies - the environmental conditions in regions that few readers had visited or experienced first-hand. It examines novels by Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, and Jane Austen, three novelists who offer important insights into how ecologies in Britain and abroad were characterized in terms of their actual or potential agricultural productivity. Rather than visions of an unspoiled Nature, their novels deal with the complex intersections between the natural world and the socio-political and economic values, assumptions, needs, and desires of their characters.