Romantic Ecocriticism

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).

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.

• Introduction - Dewey W. HallChapter 1. Ecological Horology: The Nature of Time during the Romantic Period - Marcus TomalinChapter 2. Naturalists’ Interpretations: Daffodils, Swallows, and a Floating Island - Dewey W. HallChapter 3. ‘It cannot be a sin to seek to save an earth-born being’: Radical Ecotheology inByron’s Heaven and Earth - J. Andrew HubbellChapter 4. Process and Presence: Geological Influence and Innovation in Shelley’s ‘Mont Blanc’ - Bryon WilliamsChapter 5. ‘Perpetual Analogies’ and ‘Occult Harmonies’: Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Ecological Selves - Kaitlin MondelloChapter 6. An Uncertain Spirit of an Unstable Place: Frankenstein in the Anthropocene - Shalon NobleChapter 7. Wild West and Western Wildness: A Transatlantic Perspective - Jude FrodymaChapter 8. Ecocentering the Self: William Howitt, Thoreau, and the Environmental Imagination - Ryan David LeackChapter 9. Toward a Romantic Poetics of Acknowledgement: Wordsworth, Clare, and Aldo Leopold’s ‘Land Ethi