After London
or, Wild England
Richard Jefferies (Edited and Introduced by Michael Kramp and Sarita Jayanty Mizin)
Richard Jefferies’s After London; Or, Wild England (1885) imagines an undetermined ecological event that devastates London and transforms England, its land, people, and wildlife. Told in two parts, Jefferies details the processes and effects of a “change” on individuals, their relationships, and their hopes. The story is divided into two parts and shared by an unidentified narrator from an unspecified future moment. In part II, the narrator details a brutal society seemingly devoid of the spirit of Victorian progress.
In this updated critical edition, Sarita Jayanty Mizin and Michael Kramp provide a new scholarly apparatus for engaging with the narrative, its historical contexts, and its contemporary legacies, making the text accessible for diverse readers. They include diverse appendices, allowing teachers, students, and scholars the opportunity to explore After London’s cultural importance to England’s changing landscape, nineteenth-century conceptions of climate and climate change, and Victorian fears of racial degeneration. In addition, they invite us to consider Jefferies’s fiction within discussions about the fate of London, the stability of the Empire, and the changing roles of men and women in the Victorian period. Kramp and Jayanty Mizin illustrate the importance of After London to our broader understanding of the Anthropocene.
This edition is available in open access.
About the Author
Michael Kramp specializes in nineteenth-century British Literature, Critical Theory, and Masculinity Studies. He is the author of Patriarchy’s Creative Resilience(Routledge, 2024) and Disciplining Love: Austen and the Modern Man (Ohio State, 2007) and editor of Jane Austen and Masculinity (Bucknell University Press, 2017) and Jane Austen and Critical Theory (Routledge, 2021). He is co-editing the first scholarly edition of William Delisle Hay’s The Doom of the Great City (1880) for the West Virginia University Press and has published on such figures as Deleuze, Foucault, Pater, Dickens, and Lawrence. He also writes regularly for public venues on topics related contemporary patriarchy.
Sarita Jayanty Mizin specializes in nineteenth-century Comparative Literature, Postcolonial Studies, and Feminist and Queer studies. A member of the English Department at the University of Eau Claire-Wisconsin and an affiliate in Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Dr. Jayanty Mizin’s work traces early connections between women of color activist-authors. Current projects include exploring the global impact of Harriet Tubman’s legacy via meetings with educationist Pandita Ramabai and co-editing the first scholarly edition of William Delisle Hay’s The Doom of the Great City (1880). Dr. Jayanty Mizin also regularly offers public talks as Director of the Intersectional Women’s Center.
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Published: November 2024
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ISBN: 978-1-63804-153-5 PRICE: $24.95
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