Queer assemblages and the ecoGothic in neo-Victorian fiction
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 22112190 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Rosario Arias (0000-0001-6252-3956, Universidad de Málaga, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Volume | 13 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Publication date | 2026-12-31 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Cogent Arts and Humanities (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2331-1983 • E-ISSN: 2331-1983 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/23311983.2026.2687980 |
| OpenAlex | W7166864479 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 33 |
Cross-fertilising the ecoGothic, critical plant studies, posthumanism and assemblage thinking, this article will examine Noah Medlock’s neo-Victorian novel A Botanical Daughter (2024), which engages with the human-vegetal in an innovative way. The current emphasis on relational ecologies, which is at the heart of the nonhuman and the vegetal turns, feeds into literary works which imaginatively illustrate a more open understanding between the human and the nonhuman. However, this can also be found in the Victorians’ alternative approaches to ecological and scientific thought, documented both in literature and scientific texts. This article will demonstrate the connections between then and now by means of keeping the doubled perspective that characterises neo-Victorianism. In this sense, it will refer to the nineteenth-century botanical gothic embodied in the orchid to discuss the contemporary anxieties and allure of vegetal life in Medlock’s neo-Victorian novel. In it, the assembling relationality between fungi, plants, human, objects, and affects generates queer assemblages, non-hierarchical rhizomatic structures, and in so doing this ecoGothic novel speculates on entangled identities and family configurations. All in all, A Botanical Daughter narrates an ‘otherwise’ story, following Donna Haraway, thus proving the power of storytelling to imagine alternative realities
Ethnography · Narrative · Queer · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Spatial and Cultural Studies
| Highly cited | No |
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