This essay recasts the central locale of The Mill on the Floss in order to show how the geography and society of George Eliot's novel function together as a conjoined ecological system. I show that the port at St. Ogg's is set on an estuary, and from this observation, I claim that the entanglement of multiple estuarial waters provides a formal model for the overall ecology of the novel. Referring to this system as “ecological form,” the essay shows how the characters’ misunderstanding of the estuarial nature of the St. Ogg's hydrography is the primary source of the communal divisions with which the novel is so famously riven. In so doing, this essay makes two methodological interventions, one local, and one slightly more global. In the first, I show how unsticking the progression of our criticism from that of a novel's plot—especially one with such a catastrophically strong telos as Mill’s—can allow us to view form and, particularly, geography as newly vital to literary history. This leads to the second intervention, in which I suggest that reading practices in an age of environmental collapse should look beyond disaster itself and toward affected communities’ systemic ties to those extraneous systems—economic, legal, imperial—that aid and abet disasters elsewhere and even ignore the potential for catastrophic reoccurrence in the near future. In other words, reading for water readily yields a wide-ranging map of global capitalism perhaps unexpectedly centered on a small town in Lincolnshire.

中文翻译：

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乔治艾略特的河口形态

这篇文章重新塑造了牙线上的磨坊为了展示乔治·艾略特小说中的地理和社会如何作为一个联合生态系统发挥作用。我展示了圣奥格的港口设置在一个河口，从这个观察中，我声称多个河口水域的纠缠为小说的整体生态提供了一个正式的模型。这篇文章将这个系统称为“生态形式”，展示了人物对圣奥格河口水文学性质的误解是如何导致小说如此著名的社区划分的主要来源。在这样做的过程中，本文提出了两种方法干预，一种是局部的，一种是稍微全球化的。首先，我展示了我们的批评与小说情节的进展是如何脱节的——尤其是一个具有灾难性的强烈目的的小说，如磨的——可以让我们将形式，尤其是地理视为对文学史至关重要的新事物。这导致了第二次干预，我建议在环境崩溃时代的阅读实践应该超越灾难本身，并着眼于受影响社区与那些在其他地方帮助和教唆灾难的无关系统——经济、法律、帝国——的系统性联系，以及甚至忽略在不久的将来灾难性再次发生的可能性。换句话说，阅读水很容易产生一张范围广泛的全球资本主义地图，也许出人意料地集中在林肯郡的一个小镇上。