Resonating with contemporary ecological and queer theory, this book pioneers the theorization of the Victorian idyll, establishing its nature, lineaments, and significance as a formal mode widely practised in nineteenth-century British culture across media and genre.

Thomas Hughes is an art historian who has published on John Ruskin, Victorian art, ecology and temporality.

Emma Merkling is Rome Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and Deputy Associate Director of Research at the Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies International at Durham University.

Foreword Introduction 1. Idyll as Refuge: The Settler's Dream 2. 'Cutting So "Sweetly"': Idyllist Wood Engravings and the Lost Boxwood Forests 3. Multicolour as Disavowal: The Racial Politics of the Nineteenth-Century Idyll 4. John Addington Symonds's Theocritus and the Homoerotic Idyll in Sicily 5. Ancient and Modern: Attention and Environmental Change in the Victorian Pictorial Idyll 6. Queer Pastoral Soundscapes and the Idyllic Voice: Vernon Lee, A. Mary F. Robinson, and Lady Archibald Campbell 7. Plant Subjects, Plant Erotics: Julia Margaret Cameron's Creeping Idyll 8. Wondrous Transformation in Dante Gabriel Rossetti's La Ghirlandata