Carol Rifelj Faculty Lecture Series: Alicia Peaker

Digital Readings and “Ferny, Mossy Discoveries”: Visualizing the Natural Worlds of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Mary Webb’s Gone to Earth.
Lecture by Alicia Peaker, Center for Teaching, Learning & Research.

How might the ecosystems and biospheres of novels be represented digitally? Can we develop useful digital models for contextualizing human characters within the fictional natural worlds they inhabit? And what impacts might such models have on the ways we read and understand literatures of the environment? Beginning with Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) and Mary Webb’s Gone To Earth (1917), this project uses digital humanities methods to situate humans and nonhuman others within the ecosystems of the novels they inhabit.