Teaching & Learning Guide for: Ecocriticism in British Romantic Studies

Author's Introduction Because environmental issues are nowadays attracting unprecedented levels of public attention and concern, an ecocritical approach to the study of Romantic literature has the potential to inspire and energize the teaching and learning process. By examining the integral role that Romantic‐era thought has played – and continues to play – in the history of ecological science, conservation, environmental ethics, and animal studies, readers gain an enhanced appreciation of Romanticism's modernity and of the continuing relevance of Romanticism's legacy in the present‐day world. Author Recommends: Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 1991). A foundational text in Romantic ecocriticism, this book establishes the critical field of ‘Romantic ecology’ upon a polemical rejection of new historicist theory and critical practice as popularized by influential critics like Jerome McGann, Alan Liu, and Marjorie Levinson, each of whom regard Romantic nature as a social construction fraught with ideological and political significance. In Bate's view, new historicist criticism fails to account for the ecological‐materialist aspects of Wordsworthian pastoral writing, which, he argues, attempts to imagine ‘an unmediated, unalienated relationship with nature’ (29). Aside from its polemical intervention in the field of Romantic critical theory and practice, the book as a whole provides a helpful introductory overview of Wordsworth's naturalism and its relationship to the history of ecological thought. Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth (London: Picador, 2000). Developing ecocritical arguments first introduced in Romantic Ecology (1991), Bate adapts Heidegger's concepts of ‘being’ and ‘dwelling’ in order to conduct an ‘ecopoetical’ reading of key works by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Clare, and other poets. For Bate, ‘ecopoetics’ refers to a mode of writing that imaginatively explores the radical alterity of non‐human creatures and natural environments; thus, in his view, ecopoetical writing must be differentiated from ecopolitical writing, the latter of which is a distinctively urban mode of representation thoroughly imbued with human cultural and ideological concerns. According to Bate's primitivist paradigm, ecopoetical (as opposed to ecopolitical) writings have the capacity to restore the severed connection between humans and the natural environment by helping to engender an ethical attitude of respect for, and humility in the face of, the non‐human world. Laurence Coupe, ed., The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2000). This collection includes brief excerpts from 50 previously published essays written by canonical authors (from Blake and Wordsworth to Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence) and numerous modern British and American ecocritics (including Jonathan Bate, Lawrence Buell, Richard Kerridge, and Kate Soper). Divided into discrete sections addressing, respectively, ‘Green Tradition’, ‘Green Theory’, and ‘Green Reading’, the book offers a wealth of material on ecological writing and criticism from the Romantic period to the late twentieth century. Issues addressed by the book include the legacies of Romantic ecology, the history of environmental writing, the ecological critique of modernity, and the social politics of nature, culture, and gender. Kevin Hutchings, Imagining Nature: Blake's Environmental Poetics (Montreal and Kingston: McGill‐Queen's University Press, 2002). Opening a dialogue between ecocriticism and poststructuralist discourse theory, Imagining Nature investigates the politics of nature and ‘nature's economy’ as represented in Blake's oeuvre, focusing in particular on The Book of Thel , Milton , and Jerusalem . The book takes issue with the common critical argument that Blake despised the material world, and that he ultimately rejected nature in favour of idealized abstractions like imagination and eternity. According to Hutchings, Blake's well‐known verbal indictments of the material world stem from the fact that he, more than any other Romantic poet, was wary of the ways in which scientific and deistical concepts of nature were commonly invoked to ‘naturalize’ established modes of political authority and to police and regulate human behavior. Blake's discourse on nature thus reflects not a deep‐seated anti‐materialist bias so much as a thoroughgoing critique of normative politics, a critique having important implications for both social and environmental ethics. Mark Lussier, Romantic Dynamics: The Poetics of Physicality (New York, NY: St. Martin's Press, 2000). Questioning the common but reductive view that the Romantics rejected Enlightenment science, Lussier argues that Romantic poetry anticipates insights associated with twentieth‐century theories of relativity and quantum physics. Focusing primarily on the work of poets like Blake, Coleridge, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lussier proposes that Romantic writers and modern‐day physicists share a deep‐seated fascination for indeterminacy, uncertainty, relativity, and complexity. By resisting the dualistic subject/object paradigm informing classical scientific epistemology, the Romantics, in Lussier's view, also opposed the theory and practice of a burgeoning contemporary capitalism that transformed the material world into mere ‘grist for the mill of the industrial revolution’ (49). James C. McKusick, Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology (New York, NY: St. Martin's Press, 2000). Observing that the influence of British Romanticism has been largely ignored or deliberately effaced in literary and scientific discussions of American environmental history, McKusick argues that a full‐blown ecological consciousness emerged among British Romantic writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and that this mindset provided a crucial conceptual basis for American environmentalism. For McKusick, Romantic ecological consciousness is indebted to eighteenth‐century conceptions of ‘the economy of nature’, a holistic interpretive paradigm according to which ‘[a]ll natural things’ were thought to ‘exist in reciprocal relation to other things’. Positing the interconnection and interdependence of all natural objects, organisms, and processes, this paradigm informed the Romantic critique of scientific atomism while also ‘bear[ing] some functional resemblance to our modern conception of a global ecosystem’ (39). After conducting carefully historicized ecocritical readings of Wordsworth, Blake, Coleridge, John Clare, and Mary Shelley, Green Writing traces British Romanticism's influence in the major works of such American nature writers as Emerson, Thoreau, John Muir, and Mary Austin, providing the first sustained transatlantic study of Green Romantic discourse and practice. Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco, CA: Harper, 1980). Focusing on the age‐old association of women and nature, this book examines Enlightenment science's androcentric ideology and practice of human mastery over the natural environment. A pioneering text in the field of ecofeminism, The Death of Nature examines ideological connections between mechanistic thought and the domination of women and nature, while also investigating the various ways in which science contributed to the Romantic‐era industrial revolution and its unprecedented exploitation of natural resources. Particularly useful for an understanding of the Romantic response to Enlightenment science is the examination of Baconian empiricism in Chapter 7, w

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