Teaching & Learning Guide for: Ecocriticism in British Romantic Studies
Authors: Hutchings Kevin , Matthews Charity 
Published: February 2008

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, where Merchant illuminates a series of disturbing connections between Bacon's scientific method and the legal role that the famous scientist played in the Crown's inquisition and persecution of witches in the early seventeenth century.

Timothy Morton, Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the Natural World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

This book combines ecological and cultural materialist critical perspectives to elucidate Percy Bysshe Shelley's vegetarian philosophy of diet and its relationship to questions of nature, animality, class, and consumption. According to Morton, vegetarianism is for Shelley much more than merely a dietary choice, revealing larger concerns regarding the body and its relationship to contemporary ideological, political, aesthetic, moral, and ethical issues. This book is useful for the sheer scope of its discussions, which deal with numerous Shelleyan works (both in poetry and prose) while also considering a broad selection of well‐known and obscure contextual works by contemporary animal rights activists, vegetarians, social commentators, and minor literary authors.

Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2007).

This provocative study is essential reading for students and teachers interested in investigating the theory and practice of Romantic ecocriticism. Drawing eclectically upon the work of numerous philosophers and critical theorists, including Adorno, Derrida, Descartes, Freud, Hegel, Heidegger, Kant, Lacan, Marx, and others, Morton undertakes a thoroughgoing critique of modern ecocritical aesthetics, including especially the tendency among ecocritics to privilege ‘ecomimetic’ modes of writing that attempt to simulate a sense of immersion in an idealized environment. Ultimately, for Morton, such writing – and the ecocriticism that celebrates it – hinges on an act of bad faith, pretending to embrace the non‐human world when in fact it merely aestheticizes it and thus keeps it at a distance. This process of distancing, while ultimately inescapable, is best addressed in the context of a revised ecocritical practice that rejects ‘nature’ itself as ‘a transcendental term in a material mask’, a term that ‘ironically impedes a proper relationship with the earth and its life‐forms’ (14, 2).

Onno Oerlemans, Romanticism and the Materiality of Nature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002).

Oerlemans takes issue with one of the central assumptions informing much previous Romantic ecocriticism: the idea that an ecological understanding of, and appreciation for, the holistic interconnectedness and interdependency of all things functions to generate respect for material environments and the non‐human Others that inhabit them. For Oerlemans, environmental ethics must be founded not on an idealistic effort to reconcile subject and object, but on a somatic experiential apprehension of nature's irreducible otherness and the humbling understanding that human language is ultimately incapable of representing this otherness. In his readings of poetical works by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Clare, P. B. Shelley, and others, Oerlemans thus highlights passages in which the desire for an unmediated, unalienated relationship with nature is frustrated by ‘the shock of the material’, a somatic experience that, he claims, ‘allows us to see genuine otherness of the material, beyond individual or cultural identities’ (209–10). Among its major topics of study, the book offers alternative ecocritical readings of Wordsworthian elegy, Romantic animality and anthropomorphism, the politics and ethics of Shelley's vegetarianism, Romantic taxonomic practices, and Romantic travel writing.

David Perkins, Romanticism and Animal Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

For scholars interested in understanding the history of animal rights philosophy and activism in the Romantic period, this book provides an indispensable source of information and learned commentary. A work of literary historicism, Romanticism and Animal Rights locates the origin of the animal rights movement in Romantic‐era discourses and practices regarding pet‐keeping, hunting, animal‐baiting, meat‐eating, and the relationship between class and the status and treatment of working animals. While the book includes separate chapters on literary writings by William Cowper, John Clare, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Charles Lamb, it also considers the work of numerous contemporary animal rights activists, including William Drummond, Thomas Erskine, John Lamb, John Oswald, and Humphry Primatt.

Kate Rigby, Topographies of the Sacred: The Poetics of Place in European Romanticism (Charlottesville, VA and London: University of Virginia Press, 2004).

Topographies of the Sacred is the first book‐length work of Romantic ecocriticism to examine British and German Romanticisms comparatively, focusing on the writings of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Clare, Scott, and Ruskin, on the one hand, and Goethe, Kant, Novalis, Schelling, Schiller, and Eichendorff on the other. Influenced by Jonathan Bate's work on Heideggerian ecopoetics, Topographies of the Sacred considers the Romantic poetics of place in relation to concepts of the divine and ineffable, paying particular attention to moments of theophany or ‘ecstatic dwelling’ that highlight the inadequacy of language and ‘the noncorrespondence of the written text and its earthly referent’ (91). Although Rigby argues that philosophy and literary criticism need to ‘regain a [lost] sense of nature's agency’ (13) in order to unsettle anthropocentric paradigms and assumptions, she also acknowledges the ways in which human understandings of nature are always inevitably inflected by ideology and social practice.

Online Materials:

James C. McKusick, ed., Romantic Circles Praxis Series, Special Issue on Romanticism and Ecology (November 2001):

http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/ecology

This online volume of essays builds upon the ecocritical momentum established in previous periodical publications, including special ‘Green Romantic’ issues of the John Clare Society Journal 14 (1995), Studies in Romanticism 35/3 (1996); and The Wordsworth Circle 28/3 (1997). Contributions include Ashton Nichols's ‘The Loves of Plants and Animals: Romantic Science and the Pleasures of Nature’; Kurt Fosso's ‘“Sweet Influences”: Human/Animal Difference and Social Cohesion in Wordsworth and Coleridge, 1794–1806’; William Stroup's ‘Henry Salt on Shelley: Literary Criticism and Ecological Identity’; Kevin Hutchings's ‘Gender, Environment, and Imperialism in William Blake's Visions of the Daughters of Albion’; Tim Fulford's ‘Wordsworth's “The Haunted Tree” and the Sexual Politics of Landscape’; and Timothy Morton's ‘“Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” as an Ambient Poem; a Study of a Dialectical Image; with Some Remarks on Coleridge and Wordsworth’.

Bridget Keegan, and James C. McKusick, eds., Romanticism, Ecology, Pedagogy. A Special Issue of the Romantic Pedagogy Commons (December 2006):

http://www.rc.umd.edu/pedagogies/commons/ecology/

Focusing on the theory and practice of Green Romantic pedagogy, the essays in this volume offer instructors valuable suggestions concerning the choice of course texts and the development of effective ecocritical approaches to teaching them. Entitled ‘Learning to Love the Fens: An Introduction to Romanticism, Ecology, and Pedagogy’, the editors’ opening essay provides a useful overview of the collection as a whole, summarizing the pedagogical approaches considered by each of the volume's contributors. The Table of Contents includes Gary Harrison's ‘Romanticism, Nature, Ecology’; Toni Wein's ‘Romanticism and the Sense of Place’; Tilar Mazzeo's ‘Teaching Green Romanticism to Environmental Studies Majors’; Thomas Hothem's ‘Surveying the Literary Landscape: The Romantic Anthology as Environment’; Scott Hess's ‘Three “Natures”: Teaching Romantic Ecology in the Poetry of William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, and John Clare’; Timothy Ziegenhagen's ‘John Clare's “Domestic Tree”: Freedom and Home in “The Fallen Elm”’; William Stroup's ‘Reading the Field Marks of Poetry’; and Timothy Brownlow's ‘Only Connect’.

Romantic Natural History:

http://users.dickinson.edu/~nicholsa/Romnat/romnat1.htm

Constructed and maintained by Ashton Nichols, this Web site offers numerous resources for scholars wishing to study Romantic‐era natural history (c.1750–1859), including such topics as botany, zoology, and geology. The site provides a wealth of information on the period's major natural historians and on the contemporary authors, artists and illustrators who responded to their work. It also includes a substantial and regularly updated bibliography of relevant primary and secondary sources.

Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE):

http://www.asle.umn.edu

This is the homepage for ASLE (pronounced ‘as‐lee’), the world's largest international scholarly society devoted to the study of related literary and environmental issues. From a pedagogical standpoint, one of ASLE's greatest strengths is its openness to student participation and its promotion of graduate student professional development. The ASLE homepage provides links to various useful resources, including the ASLE Handbook on Graduate Study in Literature and Environment, information regarding ASLE's mentoring program for graduate students, and calls for papers. Other links direct scholars to such resources as an Introduction to Ecocriticism, an electronic version of ASLE's annual bibliography of member scholarship, sample syllabi for courses in Literature and Environment, and a list of posted jobs and available fellowships. The site also provides links to the homepages of ASLE's global affiliate organizations in Australia‐New Zealand, Canada, India, Japan, Korea, and the United Kingdom; and it offers information on ISLE (Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment), ASLE's official journal.

Association for the Study of Literature and Environment – United Kingdom (ASLE‐UK):

http://www.asle.org.uk/home.html

The homepage for ASLE‐UK, this site offers, among other things, a brief Introduction to Ecocriticism, a bibliography of key critical works in the field, pedagogical materials on the theme of Education for Sustainable Development, and information regarding Green Letters, ASLE‐UK's interdisciplinary journal. The site also provides access to information regarding ecocritical conferences in Europe and North America.

William Blake Archive:

http://www.blakearchive.org

The William Blake Archive is an indispensable resource for students and teachers of Blake's poetry, offering a comprehensive digital archive of his illuminated books, drawings, paintings, and engravings. While not concerned with ecological issues, the site can help ecocritics to account for both the verbal and visual aspects of Blake's art while shedding light on the materiality of his artistic and poetical practice. The archive includes useful biographical information, a glossary of Blakean concepts and characters, a chronology of important events and works, information on the technique of illuminated printing, suggestions for further research, and links to related sites.

John Clare Homepage:

http://www.johnclare.info/default.html

Given John Clare's minutely particularized observations of local place and his celebration of a ‘language that is ever green’, it is no wonder that his writings have become immensely popular among Romantic ecocritics. The Clare Homepage provides transcriptions of such poems as ‘Helpston Green’ and ‘The Nightingale's Nest’; and it offers access to various scholarly resources, including a bibliography of key critical works, and a link to the homepage of the John Clare Society. It also provides a venue for the publication of such relevant scholarly articles as Tim Fulford's ‘Cowper, Wordsworth, Clare: The Politics of Trees’ and Richard Mabey's ‘Nature's Voyeurs’.

Sample Syllabus:

Green Romanticism (a one‐semester/13‐week survey course that can be adapted for delivery at either the senior undergraduate or post‐graduate levels)

Course Description:

In recent years, critics have begun to reassess Romantic literature in light of the contemporary rise of environmentalism, inaugurating in the process the field of critical inquiry now known as ‘Green Romanticism’ or ‘Romantic Ecology’. Following trends in Romantic ecocriticism, this course examines the ways in which selected Romantic‐period texts respond to such things as Enlightenment science and natural history, environmental ethics, environmental aesthetics, and animal welfare activism. It also explores the following questions germane to a study of Romantic environmentalism: What are the environmental and social implications of nature's dominant metaphorical representations in Romantic discourse (nature as divinity, nature as female, nature as garden, nature as wilderness, nature as Other, etc.)? How does Romantic nostalgia for a lost ‘golden age’, paradisal garden, or idealized rural life function both poetically and politically? What are the environmental implications of contemporary aesthetic categories such as the sublime, the beautiful, and the picturesque? Does Romanticism offer a practical ethical alternative to traditional anthropocentric concepts of nature, or is Romantic subjectivity itself thoroughly anthropocentric? Finally, how do the texts under study deploy concepts of nature to ‘naturalize’– or to challenge – hegemonic models of gender, race, class, and nation, and to what effect? By investigating Romantic concepts of nature and culture in light of contemporary environmental and aesthetic paradigms, this course sheds light on the philosophical and historical antecedents of our modern‐day ecological crisis.

Note: Because ecocritical approaches to Romantic Studies are relatively new, no anthology devoted to Green Romantic literature has yet been published. When teaching courses on the topic, therefore, one of the challenges facing instructors involves the choice of an appropriate course text. Many of the poems listed in our sample syllabus may be found in the major Romantic literature anthologies issued by such publishers as Blackwell, Norton, or Harcourt Brace. To supplement material available in such anthologies, instructors might wish to compile a customized reading package (while bearing in mind that, by law, appropriate permissions must be obtained for all texts reproduced in such a package). In our suggested syllabus, wherever possible, we provide URLs for poems sometimes unavailable in current Romantic literature anthologies but readily available online.

Suggested Reading Schedule

Green Romanticism: History, Theory, Critical Practice

Week 1:

General Introduction to Ecocriticism: Ursula K. Heise, ‘The Hitchhiker's Guide to Ecocriticism’, PMLA 121/2 (2006): 503–16.

Introduction to Romantic Ecocriticism: Kevin Hutchings, ‘Ecocriticism in British Romantic Studies’, Literature Compass 4/1 (2007): 172–202.

Week 2:

Romantic Ecology and Literary Criticism: Nature and Representation:

Wordsworth: ‘Expostulation and Reply’; ‘The Tables Turned’.

Jonathan Bate, ‘Introduction’ and Chapter 1, Romantic Ecology, 1–35.

James C. McKusick, ‘Introduction’, Green Writing, 1–33.

Suggested background reading:

Mary Wollstonecraft: ‘On Poetry and Our Relish for the Beauties of Nature’. A recent reprint of this short essay can be found in Bridget Keegan and James C. McKusick, ed., Literature and Nature: Four Centuries of Nature Writing (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2001), 418–21.

Pastoral Poetry and the Representation of Nature

Week 3:

William Wordsworth: ‘Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey’ and ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’; Samuel Taylor Coleridge: ‘The Eolian Harp’ and ‘This Lime‐Tree Bower My Prison’; John Clare: ‘Pastoral Poesy’.

Suggested background reading:

Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology, 17–33.

Greg Garrard, ‘Radical Pastoral?’Studies in Romanticism 35/3 (1996): 449–66. A brief excerpt from this article is available in Laurence Coupe, ed., The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 2000), 182–6.

Natural Philosophy and Natural History

Week 4: Charlotte Turner Smith: Beachy Head

Suggested background reading:

Erasmus Darwin, from The Temple of Nature; or, The Origin of Society: A Poem with Philosophic Notes. Comprising the opening 97 lines of Darwin's poem, this excerpt can be found in Bridget Keegan and James C. McKusick, eds., Literature and Nature: Four Centuries of Nature Writing (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2001), 366–9.

Charles Lyell, from Principles of Geology (1830–1833). In British Literature 1780–1830, eds. Anne K. Mellor and Richard E. Matlak (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1996), 121–3.

Donna Landry, ‘Green Languages? Women Poets as Naturalists in 1653 and 1807’, The Huntington Library Quarterly 63/4 (2000): 467–89.

Week 5: Gilbert White: The Natural History of Selborne (1788–89) (London: Penguin Classics, 1987).

Suggested background reading:

Donald Worster, Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995 [1977]), Chapter 1, ‘Science in Arcadia’.

Environmental Aesthetics

Week 6: Edmund Burke: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) (Oxford: Oxford World's Classics, 1990).

Suggested background reading:

Eugene C. Hargrove, ‘Foundations of Wildlife Protection Attitudes’. The Animal Rights/Environmental Ethics Debate: The Environmental Perspective, ed. Eugene C. Hargrove (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992), 151–83.

Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth (London: Picador, 2000), Chapter 5, ‘The Picturesque Environment’.

Week 7: Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, ed. Bonamy Dobrée (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

Suggested background readings from Week 6 are also applicable to the study of sublime, beautiful, and picturesque aesthetics in this text. If instructors feel that Udolpho is too lengthy for a survey course, they might consider assigning Radcliffe's shorter novel The Romance of the Forest, which, while arguably less interesting than Udolpho, also deals extensively with Burkean concepts of the sublime and beautiful.

Habitats, Animals, and the Rights of Nature

Week 8: Samuel Taylor Coleridge: ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’; Wordsworth: ‘Nutting’; John Clare: ‘Helpston Green’ (click on ‘Poems’ at http://www.johnclare.info/default.html) and ‘The Lament of Swordy Well’ (http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/~broglio/1102/swordywell.html).

Suggested background reading:

On Coleridge's ‘Rime’: James. C. McKusick, Green Writing, 44–51.

On Wordsworth's ‘Nutting’: Kate Rigby, Topographies of the Sacred, 228–31.

On Clare: Jonathan Bate, Song of the Earth, Chapter 6, ‘Nests, Shells, Landmarks’; James. C. McKusick, Green Writing, Chapter 3, ‘The Ecological Vision of John Clare’.

Week 9: Robert Burns: ‘To a Mouse’ (http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/337.html); Coleridge: ‘To a Young Ass, Its Mother Being Tethered Near It’ (http://homepages.wmich.edu/~cooneys/poems/bad/Coleridge.ass.html); Coleridge: ‘The Nightingale’ (http://www.online‐literature.com/coleridge/642/); Clare: ‘The Nightingale's Nest’; Percy Bysshe Shelley: ‘To A Skylark’; Keats ‘Ode to a Nightingale’.

Suggested background reading:

Kurt Fosso, ‘“Sweet Influences”: Human/Animal Difference and Social Cohesion in Wordsworth and Coleridge, 1794–1806’. Romantic Circles Praxis, ed. James C. McKusick, http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/ecology/fosso/fosso.html.

David Perkins, Romanticism and Animal Rights, Chapter 1, ‘In the Beginning of Animal Rights’.

Greg Garrard, ‘The Romantics’ View of Nature’. Spirit of the Environment: Religion, Value and Environmental Concern, eds. David E. Cooper and Joy A. Palmer (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 1998), 113–30 (see especially the section entitled ‘Five Nightingales’, 124–9).

Gender, Epistemology, Science

Week 10: William Blake, The Book of Thel and Visions of the Daughters of Albion.

Suggested background reading:

On Thel: Mark Lussier, Romantic Dynamics, 54–8; Kevin Hutchings, Imagining Nature, Chapter 2, ‘Anthropocentrism, Nature's Economy, and The Book of Thel’.

On Visions: Kevin Hutchings, ‘Gender, Environment, and Imperialism in William Blake's Visions of the Daughters of Albion’. Romantic Circles Praxis, ed. James C. McKusick, http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/ecology/hutchings/hutchings.html.

Week 11: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus, ed. M. K. Joseph (Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 1980 [1831]).

Suggested background reading:

Carolyn Merchant, Death of Nature, Chapter 7.

Mark Lussier, Romantic Dynamics, 176–81.

Luc Ferry, The New Ecological Order, trans. Carol Volk (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 76–8 (section entitled ‘Frankenstein and the Sorcerer's Apprentice: Technology in Question’).

Wordsworthian Epic Contexts

Week 12: Wordsworth: Guide to the Lakes (1810), ed. Ernest de Selincourt (London: Frances Lincoln, 2004).

Suggested background reading:

Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology, 41–51.

Andrew Hazucha, ‘Neither Deep nor Shallow but National: Eco‐Nationalism in Wordsworth's Guide to the Lakes’, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 9/2 (Summer 2002): 61–73.

Week 13: Wordsworth: from The Prelude; or, Growth of a Poet's Mind: An Autobiographical Poem: Book First, ‘Introduction, Childhood, and School‐time’; Book Second, ‘School‐Time Continued’; Book Eighth, ‘Retrospect, Love of Nature leading to Love of Man’.

Suggested background reading:

Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology, 19–33.

Focus Questions for Class Discussion or Course Assignments

Is British Romanticism relevant to the concerns of present‐day environmentalism? Can British Romantic concepts of nature and human‐nature relations productively inform present‐day environmentalist theory and practice? Why or why not?

Does Romanticism provide a radical alternative to practices that commoditize, exploit, and despoil the natural world in the name of human mastery and gain, or is Romanticism to some degree complicit with such practices?

When Romantic‐era writers use terms like ‘nature’ and ‘nature's economy’, are they referring to a pristine realm of objects, organisms, and processes existing prior to or beyond human culture, or are they speaking of something socially constructed and thus all‐too‐human? Should Green Romantic criticism privilege an ‘ecopoetic’ that attempts primarily to imagine the radical otherness of non‐human organisms and environments, or should it focus on the ways in which Romantic concepts of nature are inevitably caught up in the cultural politics of such categories as gender, class, race, and ability, or such cultural ideologies as nationalism, secularism, and liberalism?

In Ecological Literary Criticism: Romantic Imagining and the Biology of Mind (1994), Karl Kroeber argues that English Romantic thought is ‘proto‐ecological’ (5). In Green Writing, however, James C. McKusick asserts that the Romantics are in fact ‘the first full‐fledged ecological writers in the Western literary tradition’ (19). Which of these arguments most accurately reflects the relationship between Romanticism and ecology?

Because of their ostensible focus on the protection of natural habitats and non‐human species rather than on issues of human social justice, environmentalists are sometimes accused of misanthropy. To what extent, if any, can this accusation be justified? (When answering this question, be sure to bear in mind Wordsworth's notion, articulated in the title to Book Eighth of The Prelude, that ‘Love of Nature lead[s] to Love of Man’.)

Much ecocriticism dwells on the problem of anthropocentrism. What are some examples of anthropocentric thinking? In what ways is anthropocentrism related to such socio‐cultural biases as androcentrism or Eurocentrism? In what ways is it different? How are anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism related? Is it ultimately possible for humans to adopt an ‘ecocentric’ perspective rather than an anthropocentric one, or is the ecological critique of anthropocentrism ultimately conducted in bad faith? To what extent are Romantics writings anthropocentric? To what extent might they be said to be ecocentric?

In ecocritical terminology, ‘speciesism’ refers to the human tendency to privilege some species over others. What are some examples of speciesism? Why do humans attribute greater value to certain species? What are the environmental implications of this preference? What is the relationship between speciesism and social biases like racism or sexism? Is there any evidence that the Romantics practiced speciesism in their writings?