Charlie Toogood
Doctoral Student in Literature - Charlie’s thesis is entitled 'Wild Landscapes and Wild Subjects: Humankind and the Biosphere in four fin de siècle Utopias’.
Research Project Title:
Wild Landscapes and Wild Subjects: Humankind and the Biosphere in four fin de siècle Utopias
Supervisors:
Dr Ella Mershon and Dr Lisa Garforth
Contact Details:
Email: c.toogood1@newcastle.ac.uk
Research Interests:
- Utopian Studies
- Science Fiction
- Anthropocene Studies
- Victorian Science Fiction
- Ecotheory
- Utopian Theory
Brief Outline of Research Project:
My research explores an alternative tradition of anti-industrial utopianism at the turn of the century in order to highlight radical, creative responses to emergent capitalist modernity and the Anthropocene. These responses range from human apocalypse narratives in Richard Jefferies’ After London, the rural mysticism of W H Hudson’s A Crystal Age, feminist utopianism and environmental vitality in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland and the abolition of ‘Nature’ in William Morris’ socialist text News From Nowhere. Particular emphasis will be on the way in which these authors reimagine both human and nonhumankind, and in doing so blur the lines between them, for a positive environmental future.
My research engages with the temporal complexities of both speculative fiction and the Anthropocene and looks back to social dreaming at the emergence of the global fossil fuel economy in order to better comprehend our current climate moment.
- ‘Utopia in the Anthropocene: Re-reading William Morris’ News From Nowhere’, Cardiff University Postgraduate Conference 2019, March 2019.