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Sensational News about Nature: Risk and Resilience in Satirical Ozone Poetry of the Victorian Era

  • Evi Zemanek EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: December 7, 2022
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Anglia
From the journal Anglia Volume 140 Issue 3-4

Abstract

From the perspective of the Environmental Humanities, ozone exerts a special fascination that is rooted in its ambiguity. It is assessed quite differently depending on whether it is encountered in the stratosphere, where the ozone layer protects us from ultraviolet radiation, or near the ground, where it is classified as a harmful substance and pollutant. Since humans cause both its formation near the ground and its destruction in the stratosphere, ozone is perceived not only as a natural phenomenon but also as an anthropogenic problem. Ever since Friedrich Schönbein discovered ozone in 1839, chemists, meteorologists, and educated citizens alike have tried to understand its ambivalent effects. In the second half of the nineteenth century, a lively debate developed in popular media to sound out the risks for human beings and the possibilities of building resilience – long before the interdisciplinary career of these concepts that we can witness today. Among the various factual and fictional texts that participated in the controversial debates about ozone, satire plays a special role, functioning per se as a meta- and counter-discourse. In the English satirical magazine Punch in particular, we can observe the emergence of satirical ozone poetry as an inventive subgenre. Presenting unknown ozone poems, this article analyses how they playfully question the emerging natural sciences and ridicule media coverage, humorously reveal insecurities, and mock cultural practices. At the same time, I argue, they should be considered an artistic medium of building resilience.1

Key terms: Ozone; risk; resilience; satire; satirical poetry; popular media

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Published Anonymously

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Published Online: 2022-12-07
Published in Print: 2022-12-01

© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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  4. Tu beoð gemæccan: The Key Concept of Maxims I Representing One of the Fundamental Principles of the World Order
  5. Wulf and Eadwacer Reloaded: John of Antioch and the Starving Wife of Odoacer
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  7. Influences of George Gordon Byron on Asdren
  8. Construction of Identity/World and ‘Symbolic Death’: A Lacanian Approach to William Golding’s Pincher Martin
  9. The Anatomist of Love and Disease in Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body
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  26. Lisa Gotto. 2021. Passing and Posing between Black and White: Calibrating the Color Line in U. S. Cinema. Film Studies. Bielefeld: transcript, 247 pp., 30 figures, € 49.00.
  27. Daniel Stein. 2021. Authorizing Superhero Comics: On the Evolution of a Popular Serial Genre. Studies in Comics and Cartoons. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, xv + 315 pp., 28 illustr., $ 34.95.
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https://doi.org/10.1515/ang-2022-0053
Keywords for this article
Ozone; risk; resilience; satire; satirical poetry; popular media

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Frontmatter
  3. Light and Divine Wisdom: An Alternative Interpretation of the Iconography of the Fuller Brooch
  4. Tu beoð gemæccan: The Key Concept of Maxims I Representing One of the Fundamental Principles of the World Order
  5. Wulf and Eadwacer Reloaded: John of Antioch and the Starving Wife of Odoacer
  6. Sensational News about Nature: Risk and Resilience in Satirical Ozone Poetry of the Victorian Era
  7. Influences of George Gordon Byron on Asdren
  8. Construction of Identity/World and ‘Symbolic Death’: A Lacanian Approach to William Golding’s Pincher Martin
  9. The Anatomist of Love and Disease in Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body
  10. Conventions of the Ungendered Narrative
  11. “In My Mind’s Eye”: On the Relocation of Hamlet’s Story by Michael Almereyda
  12. ‘Force’ and ‘Chi’: Duality, Identity, and Struggle in Star Wars and Buchi Emecheta’s Kehinde
  13. Anxious Dynamics of Exile and the Ambivalence of Arab American Identity in Diana Abu-Jaber’s Crescent: Critical Reflections and Contemplations
  14. Between Remembering and Confession: A Refugee Narrative in Dina Nayeri’s Refuge
  15. Orfeo: A Posthuman Modern Prometheus. Uncommon Powers of Musical Imagination
  16. On Literary Apathy: Forms of Dis/Affection in My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)
  17. Reviews
  18. Roberta Frank. 2022. The Etiquette of Early Northern Verse. Conway Lectures in Medieval Studies 2010. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, xxx + 265 pp., $ 65.00.
  19. Claire Breay and Joanna Story (eds.), with Eleanor Jackson. 2021. Manuscripts in the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Cultures and Connections. Dublin: Four Courts Press, xvii + 256 pp., numerous colour illustr., € 58.50.
  20. Mark Amsler. 2021. The Medieval Life of Language: Grammar and Pragmatics from Bacon to Kempe. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 264 pp., 2 figures, 2 tables, € 106.00.
  21. Alexandra Barratt and Susan Powell (eds.). 2021. The Fifteen Oes and Other Prayers: Edited from the Text Published by William Caxton (1491). Middle English Texts 61. Heidelberg: Winter, xxxvi + 54 pp., € 44.
  22. Carolin Gebauer. 2021. Making Time: World Construction in the Present-Tense Novel. Narratologia 77. Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter, xvii + 378 pp., 5 tables, 5 illustr., € 99.95.
  23. Kai Wiegandt. 2019. J. M. Coetzee’s Revisions of the Human: Posthumanism and Narrative Form. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, ix + 280 pp., € 90.94.
  24. Linda K. Hughes, Sarah Ruffing Robbins and Andrew Taylor with Heidi Hakimi-Hood and Adam Nemmers (eds.). 2022. Transatlantic Anglophone Literatures, 1776–1920: An Anthology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 808 pp., 60 illustr., £ 29.99/$ 39.95.
  25. Juliane Braun. 2019. Creole Drama: Theatre and Society in Antebellum New Orleans. Writing the Early Americas 4. Charlottesville, VA/London: The University of Virginia Press, 280 pp., 12 illustr., $ 69.50.
  26. Lisa Gotto. 2021. Passing and Posing between Black and White: Calibrating the Color Line in U. S. Cinema. Film Studies. Bielefeld: transcript, 247 pp., 30 figures, € 49.00.
  27. Daniel Stein. 2021. Authorizing Superhero Comics: On the Evolution of a Popular Serial Genre. Studies in Comics and Cartoons. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, xv + 315 pp., 28 illustr., $ 34.95.
  28. Books Reviewed: Anglia 140 (2022)
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