Romanticism And The Materiality Of Nature

Oerlemans extends current eco-critical views by synthesizing a range of viewpoints from the Romantic period.

Why are rocks and landforms so prominent in British Romantic poetry? Why, for example, does Shelley choose a mountain as the locus of a "voice... to repeal / large codes of fraud and woe"? Why does a cliff, in the boat-stealing episode of Wordsworth's Prelude, chastise the young thief? Why is petrifaction, or "stonifying," in Blake's coinage, the ultimate figure of dehumanization? Noah Heringman maintains that British literary culture was fundamentally shaped by many of the same forces that created geology as a science in the period 1770–1820. He shows that landscape aesthetics—the verbal and social idiom of landscape gardening, natural history, the scenic tour, and other forms of outdoor "improvement"—provided a shared vernacular for geology and Romanticism in their formative stages.Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology reexamines a wide range of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poetry to discover its relationship to a broad cultural consensus on the nature and value of rocks and landforms. Equally interested in the initial surge of curiosity about the earth and the ensuing process of specialization, Heringman contributes to a new understanding of literature as a key forum for the modern reorganization of knowledge.

Romantic Sustainability is a collection of sixteen essays that examine the British Romantic era in ecocritical terms. Written by scholars from five continents, this international collection addresses the works of traditional Romantic writers such as John Keats, Percy Shelley, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, and Samuel Coleridge but also delves into ecocritical topics related to authors added to the canon more recently, such as Elizabeth Inchbald and John Clare. The essays examine geological formations, clouds, and landscapes as well as the posthuman and the monstrous. The essays are grouped into rough categories that start with inspiration and the imagination before moving to the varied types of consumption associated with human interaction with the natural world. Subsequent essays in the volume focus on environmental destruction, monstrous creations, and apocalypse. The common theme is sustainability, as each contributor examines Romantic ideas that intersect with ecocriticism and relates literary works to questions about race, gender, religion, and identity.

Romanticism and Speculative Realism features a range of scholars working at the intersection of literary poetics and philosophy. It considers how the writing of the Romantic era reconceptualizes the human imagination, the natural world, and the language that correlates them in radical ways that can advance current speculative debates concerning new ontologies and new materialisms. In their wide-ranging examinations of canonical and non-canonical romantic writers, the scholars gathered here rethink the connections between the human and non-human world to envision speculative modes of social being and ecological politics. Spanning historical and national frameworks-from historical romanticism to contemporary post-romantic ecology, and from British and German romanticism to global modernity-these essays examine life in all its varied forms in, and beyond, the Anthropocene.

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.

Nineteenth-century Americans celebrated nature through many artistic forms, including natural-history writing, landscape painting, landscape design theory, and transcendental philosophy. Although we tend to associate these movements with the nation’s dawning environmental consciousness, Passions for Nature demonstrates that they instead alienated Americans from the physical environment even as they seemed to draw people to it. Rather than see these expressions of passion for nature as initiating environmental awareness, this study reveals how they contributed to a culture that remains startlingly ignorant of the details of the material world. Using as a touchstone the writings of nineteenth-century philanthropist Susan Fenimore Cooper (the daughter of famed author James Fenimore Cooper), Passions for Nature reveals that while a generalized passion for nature was intense and widespread in her era, cultural attention to the "real" physical world was quite limited. Popular artistic forms represented the natural world through specific metaphors for the American experience, cultivating a national tradition of valuing nature in terms of humanity. Johnson crosses disciplinary boundaries to demonstrate that anthropocentric understandings of the natural world result not only from the growing gulf between science and imagination that C. P. Snow located in the early twentieth century but also--and surprisingly--from cultural productions traditionally viewed as positive engagements with the environment. By uncovering the roots of a cultural alienation from nature, Passions for Nature explains how the United States came to be a nation that simultaneously reveres the natural world and yet remains dangerously distant from it.

The Handbook to Romanticism Studies is an accessible and indispensible resource providing students and scholars with a rich array of historical and up-to-date critical and theoretical contexts for the study of Romanticism. Focuses on British Romanticism while also addressing continental and transatlantic Romanticism and earlier periods Utilizes keywords such as imagination, sublime, poetics, philosophy, race, historiography, and visual culture as points of access to the study of Romanticism and the theoretical concerns and the culture of the period Explores topics central to Romanticism studies and the critical trends of the last thirty years

This fascinating interdisciplinary study examines the relationship between literary interest in visionary kinds of experience and medical ideas about hallucination and the nerves in the first half of the nineteenth century, focusing on canonical Romantic authors, the work of women writers influenced by Romanticism, and visual culture.