Troy's Affiliations: Children's Literature
Troy Boone is a specialist in Victorian studies whose areas of scholarly interest include the environmental humanities, imperialism and literature, children’s literature, and the gothic. He has recently completed a book titled Dispatches from the Victorian Anthropocene: Northern England in the Time of the Brontës, which offers an interdisciplinary study of how writers from the Brontë sisters to the late Victorians composed environmental histories bearing witness to the Anthropocene, thereby recording changing views of wilderness, urbanization, and globalization. Troy Boone has begun a study of oceanic ecological writing, tentatively titled Oceanography: A Literary History.
His first book, Youth of Darkest England: Working-Class Children at the Heart of Victorian Empire, was published by Routledge in 2005. He has also published articles on such topics as Bram Stoker and fin-de-siecle decadence; Victorian tourist guidebooks; Joseph Conrad and the Titanic disaster; the Marquis de Sade and romantic-era discourses on sexuality; Bernard Shaw and the Salvation Army; Daniel Defoe and the origins of gothic fiction; Mark Twain's detective fictions, Girl Scout handbooks, and the Nancy Drew mysteries.
His most recent publications are “Dirty Weather,” in Conrad and Nature: Essays, ed. Lissa Schneider-Rebozo, Jeffrey Mathes McCarthy, and John G. Peters (Routledge, 2019) and “Early Dickens and Ecocriticism: The Social Novelist and the Nonhuman,” in Victorians and the Environment: Ecocritical Perspectives, ed. Ronald D. Morrison and Laurence W. Mazzeno (Routledge, 2017).
Teaching
Graduate Courses
- Ecocriticism
- Global Fiction in the Victorian Age
- Savagery and Civilization
- Children’s Literature
- Imperialism and Modernity: The West Indies
- Imperialism and Modernity: The Near East
Recent Undergraduate Courses
- Seminars on Charles Dickens; the Brontës; Joseph Conrad; plants and literature; the year 1816; weather and climate in literature; the Anthropocene
- Literature and the Environment
- Contemporary Environmental Literature
- Romantic Nature
- Weather, Climate, Literature
- Humans, Animals, and Machines in Victorian Literature
- The Gothic Imagination
Nineteenth-century British literature, ecocriticism, children's literature