Romantic Ecocriticism: Origins and Legacies

by Dewey W. Hall (Editor), James C. McKusick University of Missouri-Ka (Foreword by), Colin Carman (Contribution by), Alicia Carroll (Contribution by), Judyta Frodyma (Contribution by)

Overview

Romantic Ecocriticism: Origins and Legacies is unique due to its rare assemblage of essays, which has not appeared within an edited collection before. Romantic Ecocriticism is distinct because the essays in the collection develop transnational and transhistorical approaches to the proto-ecological early environmental aspects in British and American Romanticism. First, the edition’s transnational approach is evident through transatlantic connections such as, but are not limited to, comparisons among the following writers: William Wordsworth, William Howitt, and Henry D. Thoreau; John Clare and Aldo Leopold; Charles Darwin and Ralph W. Emerson. Second, the transhistorical approach of RomanticEcocriticism is evident in connections among the following writers: William Wordsworth and Emily Bronte; Thomas Malthus and George Gordon Byron; James Hutton and Percy Shelley; Erasmus Darwin and Charlotte Smith; Gilbert White and Dorothy Wordsworth among others. Thus, Romantic Ecocriticism offers a dynamic collection of essays dedicated to links between scientists and literary figures interested in natural history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781498518024
Publisher:	Lexington Books
Publication date:	03/15/2016
Series:	Ecocritical Theory and Practice
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Dewey W. Hall is professor of English at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. He is also the author of Romantic Naturalists, Early Environmentalists: An Ecocritical Study, 1789–1912 (2014).

Table of Contents

Introduction - Dewey W. Hall

Chapter 1. Ecological Horology: The Nature of Time during the Romantic Period - Marcus Tomalin

Chapter 2. Naturalists’ Interpretations: Daffodils, Swallows, and a Floating Island - Dewey W. Hall

Chapter 3. ‘It cannot be a sin to seek to save an earth-born being’: Radical Ecotheology in
Byron’s Heaven and Earth - J. Andrew Hubbell

Chapter 4. Process and Presence: Geological Influence and Innovation in Shelley’s ‘Mont Blanc’ - Bryon Williams

Chapter 5. ‘Perpetual Analogies’ and ‘Occult Harmonies’: Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Ecological Selves - Kaitlin Mondello

Chapter 6. An Uncertain Spirit of an Unstable Place: Frankenstein in the Anthropocene - Shalon Noble

Chapter 7. Wild West and Western Wildness: A Transatlantic Perspective - Jude Frodyma

Chapter 8. Ecocentering the Self: William Howitt, Thoreau, and the Environmental Imagination -Ryan David Leack

Chapter 9. Toward a Romantic Poetics of Acknowledgement: Wordsworth, Clare, and Aldo Leopold’s ‘Land Ethic’ - Gary Harrison


Chapter 10. Small is Beautiful: Rethinking Localism from Wordsworth to Eliot - Alicia Carroll

Chapter 11. Byron’s Flower Power: Ecology and Effeminacy in Sardanapalus -Colin Carman

Chapter 12. The Miseducation of Chris McCandless: Romanticism, Reading, and Environmental Education - Lisa Ottum

Editorial Reviews

Romantic Ecocriticism considers how natural philosophy and science informed, and sometimes influenced, 19th-century English and American Romantic writing. The essays tend to dwell on canonical figures; Wordsworth, Byron, the Shelleys, Emerson, and Thoreau play important roles in most of the essays, although the final contributions connect the Romantic movement to 20th-century environmentalism. In putting the collection together, Hall intends to erode the assumption that these Romantic writers were mere idealists by demonstrating the extent to which they drew on contemporaneous theories from the natural sciences. The essays broaden the critical context of Romantic study by traversing national boundaries to highlight thematic connections between US and English Romantic writers. The contributors range from full professors to graduate students, but essays are consistently insightful—sometimes, perhaps, more intriguing for the 19th-century scientific theories that are unveiled than for the critical insights those theories make available. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students; researchers/faculty.

Choice Reviews

This volume provides a good range of essays exploring the importance of British Romanticism—and...early nineteenth-century American literature—to contemporary ecological literary criticism.

Review 19

Romantic Ecocriticism is a forceful reminder that literature and science do not exist in isolation. These essays further establish the engagement of literary Romanticism with the major scientific and socio-theoretical debates of the period.

Rochelle Johnson

Romantic Ecocriticsm is a welcome addition to the fertile and ever-expanding critical terrain shared by Romanticists and Ecocritics. Hall weaves a rich and important story.... The relationship and intersections between Romantic science and Romantic ecocriticism, surprisingly not brought together more in scholarship, was to me one of the volume’s most interesting and exciting aspects, as it illuminates not only texts and interrelations in new—modern, ecological, mesh-like—ways, but also potential new environmental ‘legacies’ and directions.

Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism - Bethan Roberts

With his edited collection, Romantic Ecocriticism, Dewey Hall launches a much-needed "new wave" of eco-historical scholarship of Romanticism, one that explores ecocriticism's own historical roots in transatlantic writing of the late Georgian period. Representing a great diversity of theoretical concerns, these essays are united in two vital objectives: to break down the 'two culture' divide between ecocriticism and ecological science, and to move beyond the narrow presentism of our ecological anxieties, toward multiple encounters with geological and biological 'deep time,' the formulae for which first emerged around 1800. Romantic Ecocriticism takes us deep into the Anthropocene, and beyond.

Gillen D'Arcy Wood

The volume will be of great interest to Romanticists and ecocritics alike.

European Romantic Review

Romantic Ecocriticism considers how natural philosophy and science informed, and sometimes influenced, 19th-century English and American Romantic writing. The essays tend to dwell on canonical figures; Wordsworth, Byron, the Shelleys, Emerson, and Thoreau play important roles in most of the essays, although the final contributions connect the Romantic movement to 20th-century environmentalism. In putting the collection together, Hall intends to erode the assumption that these Romantic writers were mere idealists by demonstrating the extent to which they drew on contemporaneous theories from the natural sciences. The essays broaden the critical context of Romantic study by traversing national boundaries to highlight thematic connections between US and English Romantic writers. The contributors range from full professors to graduate students, but essays are consistently insightful—sometimes, perhaps, more intriguing for the 19th-century scientific theories that are unveiled than for the critical insights those theories make available. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students; researchers/faculty.

Choice

Romantic Ecocriticism considers how natural philosophy and science informed, and sometimes influenced, 19th-century English and American Romantic writing. The essays tend to dwell on canonical figures; Wordsworth, Byron, the Shelleys, Emerson, and Thoreau play important roles in most of the essays, although the final contributions connect the Romantic movement to 20th-century environmentalism. In putting the collection together, Hall intends to erode the assumption that these Romantic writers were mere idealists by demonstrating the extent to which they drew on contemporaneous theories from the natural sciences. The essays broaden the critical context of Romantic study by traversing national boundaries to highlight thematic connections between US and English Romantic writers. The contributors range from full professors to graduate students, but essays are consistently insightful—sometimes, perhaps, more intriguing for the 19th-century scientific theories that are unveiled than for the critical insights those theories make available. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students; researchers/faculty.

CHOICE