The introduction positions the book in relation to extant scholarship, particularly on the Tambor... more The introduction positions the book in relation to extant scholarship, particularly on the Tambora eruption, material ecocriticism, and the Anthropocene. Writing Tambora innovatively addresses the question of how global catastrophe is rhetorically produced. The subsequent discussion details three areas of research which the book draws on and to which it also contributes: disaster studies; new materialism and speculative realism; and the cultural history of climate change. Challenging the idea of the Anthropocene as an epistemological breach between past and present, Writing Tambora instead articulates a more historicist methodology which finds important resonances between Romantic and present-day imaginings of climate change-especially around questions of agency-and therefore brings Romantic studies and the environmental humanities into productive dialogue. Keywords Material ecocriticism • Speculative realism • New materialism • Disaster studies • Anthropocene • Climate change On the evening of 5 April 1815, the inhabitants of Java heard a number of explosions that continued intermittently until the following day. At first they were 'almost universally attributed to distant cannon,' but in fact this was the opening salvo in the eruption of Mount Tambora on the isle of Sumbawa, hundreds of miles to the east. 1 A hazy atmosphere and slight fall of ash followed over several days. At about 7 pm on 10 April, the CHAPTER 1 Introduction
Click here for a PDF version. Click here to buy the book on Amazon. The Romantic origins of envir... more Click here for a PDF version. Click here to buy the book on Amazon. The Romantic origins of environmentalism, scholars have begun to realize, must be told as a transatlantic story. While many scholars recognize that Romantic writers such as Wordsworth, Emerson, and Thoreau inspired and helped shape the modern environmental movement, the specifics of how that influence played out and crossed national boundaries, in social and cultural as well as literary terms, has not been fully documented, partly because of artificial divisions between American and British studies of literature and culture. Only during the past few years, with the burgeoning of transatlantic Romanticism, have significant numbers of critics begun to follow the lead of James McKusick's important early study, Green Romanticism (2000), in exploring such transatlantic linkages in depth. Dewey Hall's book aims to further this project by tracing lines of influence from Gilbert White through Wordsworth, Emerson, Octavia Hill, and John Muir. Hall's goal, he writes, is "to demonstrate how Romantic naturalists-Wordsworth and Emerson-motivated early environmentalists-namely, Hill and Muir-to take action in protecting the environment" (7).
While much recent ecocriticism has questioned the value of nature as a concept, <<T... more While much recent ecocriticism has questioned the value of nature as a concept, <<Thought's Wilderness>> insists that it is analytically and politically indispensable, and that romanticism shows us why. Without a concept of nature, Greg Ellermann argues, our thinking is limited to the world that capitalism has made. Defamiliarizing the tradition of romantic nature writing, Ellermann contends that the romantics tried to circumvent the domination of nature that is essential to modern capitalism. As he shows, poets and philosophers in the period such as Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Wordsworth, and Percy Shelley were highly attuned to nature's ephemeral, ungraspable forms: clouds of vapor, a trace of ruin, deep silence, and the "world-surrounding ether." Further, he explains how nature's vanishing—its vulnerability and its flight from apprehension—became a philosophical and political problem. In response to a nascent industrial capitalism, romantic writers developed a poetics of wilderness—a poetics that is attentive to fleeting presence and that seeks to let things be. Trying to imagine what ultimately eludes capture, the romantics recognized the complicity between conceptual and economic domination, and they saw how thought itself could become a technology for control. This insight, Ellermann proposes, motivates romantic efforts to think past capitalist instrumentality and its devastation of the world. Ultimately, this new work undertakes a fundamental rethinking of the aesthetics and politics of nature.
Click here for a PDF version. Click here to buy the book on Amazon. In recent years, as a result ... more Click here for a PDF version. Click here to buy the book on Amazon. In recent years, as a result of broad concerns about climate change, food, the deterioration in the quality of natural and human environments, and the significant impact that human beings are having upon all aspects of our physical environments, environmental thought has taken on an increasingly important place in academic and public arenas. It has also undergone a sea change in theoretical terms, strengthening its perspectives and raising important new questions. Nowadays, we are much more aware of the degree to which natural environments are products of historical and cultural processes, and the list of new and important fields for the study of human and nonhuman environments continues to grow. This rising interest is reflected by this new collection of essays on late eighteenth-and early nineteenth century British and American ecopoetics. Including solicited papers as well as papers first given at various academic conferences and then revised for publication, the volume offers a fairly broad range of essays on Romantic ecocriticism of varying quality and importance. The editor, Dewey H. Hall, has assembled a collection that speaks to both academics and students. The collection might have been a little more unified, however, if he had encouraged the authors to refer to each other's contributions. Also, Hall somewhat overstates the focus of the book when he argues-in the introduction-that its orientation is uniquely transatlantic and transhistorical. What Hall appears to mean by these terms is not theoretical models that seek to think across periods and national boundaries, but instead comparative studies, made between authors living in different places (i.e. Britain and America) and different times (less clear, since transhistorical seems to be used even when writers are referring to their contemporaries). Nevertheless, in showing how literary writers drew upon science and natural history, these essays are clearly interdisciplinary. Overall, then, this volume is both a welcome addition to current scholarship on ecocriticism and a valuable contribution to Romantic literary criticism.
British Romanticism, Climate Change, and the Anthropocene, 2017
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this p... more The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
This article concerns the question of influence evident in the transatlantic relationship between... more This article concerns the question of influence evident in the transatlantic relationship between William Wordsworth and Ralph Waldo Emerson. I argue that influence is linked vitally to light—celestial or the northern lights (i.e. aurora borealis)—, which is evident in the prose and poetry by Wordsworth and Emerson. Electromagnetic energy conducts a circuit; this is reflected also in the transatlantic crosscurrent of the precursor and progeny. Notably, Wordsworth’s “The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman” (1798) and his Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802) influence Emerson’s The Poet (1844), which has been informed also by Michael Faraday’s Experimental Researches in Electricity (1839). The matter pertaining to influence is inextricably connected to electromagnetism, light, and aurora borealis that appear in the work by Wordsworth and Emerson. Inspiration, then, ultimately can be derived from a celestial source in relation to the terrestrial.
... Gay, John. The Beggar's Opera. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Restorati... more ... Gay, John. The Beggar's Opera. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Restoration and The Eighteenth Century. Vol. 1C. Ed. ... Inchbald, Elizabeth. Every One Has His Fault. TheBroadview Anthology of Romantic Drama. Ed. Jeffrey N. Cox and Michael Gamer. ...
The introduction positions the book in relation to extant scholarship, particularly on the Tambor... more The introduction positions the book in relation to extant scholarship, particularly on the Tambora eruption, material ecocriticism, and the Anthropocene. Writing Tambora innovatively addresses the question of how global catastrophe is rhetorically produced. The subsequent discussion details three areas of research which the book draws on and to which it also contributes: disaster studies; new materialism and speculative realism; and the cultural history of climate change. Challenging the idea of the Anthropocene as an epistemological breach between past and present, Writing Tambora instead articulates a more historicist methodology which finds important resonances between Romantic and present-day imaginings of climate change-especially around questions of agency-and therefore brings Romantic studies and the environmental humanities into productive dialogue. Keywords Material ecocriticism • Speculative realism • New materialism • Disaster studies • Anthropocene • Climate change On the evening of 5 April 1815, the inhabitants of Java heard a number of explosions that continued intermittently until the following day. At first they were 'almost universally attributed to distant cannon,' but in fact this was the opening salvo in the eruption of Mount Tambora on the isle of Sumbawa, hundreds of miles to the east. 1 A hazy atmosphere and slight fall of ash followed over several days. At about 7 pm on 10 April, the CHAPTER 1 Introduction
Click here for a PDF version. Click here to buy the book on Amazon. The Romantic origins of envir... more Click here for a PDF version. Click here to buy the book on Amazon. The Romantic origins of environmentalism, scholars have begun to realize, must be told as a transatlantic story. While many scholars recognize that Romantic writers such as Wordsworth, Emerson, and Thoreau inspired and helped shape the modern environmental movement, the specifics of how that influence played out and crossed national boundaries, in social and cultural as well as literary terms, has not been fully documented, partly because of artificial divisions between American and British studies of literature and culture. Only during the past few years, with the burgeoning of transatlantic Romanticism, have significant numbers of critics begun to follow the lead of James McKusick's important early study, Green Romanticism (2000), in exploring such transatlantic linkages in depth. Dewey Hall's book aims to further this project by tracing lines of influence from Gilbert White through Wordsworth, Emerson, Octavia Hill, and John Muir. Hall's goal, he writes, is "to demonstrate how Romantic naturalists-Wordsworth and Emerson-motivated early environmentalists-namely, Hill and Muir-to take action in protecting the environment" (7).
While much recent ecocriticism has questioned the value of nature as a concept, <<T... more While much recent ecocriticism has questioned the value of nature as a concept, <<Thought's Wilderness>> insists that it is analytically and politically indispensable, and that romanticism shows us why. Without a concept of nature, Greg Ellermann argues, our thinking is limited to the world that capitalism has made. Defamiliarizing the tradition of romantic nature writing, Ellermann contends that the romantics tried to circumvent the domination of nature that is essential to modern capitalism. As he shows, poets and philosophers in the period such as Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Wordsworth, and Percy Shelley were highly attuned to nature's ephemeral, ungraspable forms: clouds of vapor, a trace of ruin, deep silence, and the "world-surrounding ether." Further, he explains how nature's vanishing—its vulnerability and its flight from apprehension—became a philosophical and political problem. In response to a nascent industrial capitalism, romantic writers developed a poetics of wilderness—a poetics that is attentive to fleeting presence and that seeks to let things be. Trying to imagine what ultimately eludes capture, the romantics recognized the complicity between conceptual and economic domination, and they saw how thought itself could become a technology for control. This insight, Ellermann proposes, motivates romantic efforts to think past capitalist instrumentality and its devastation of the world. Ultimately, this new work undertakes a fundamental rethinking of the aesthetics and politics of nature.
Click here for a PDF version. Click here to buy the book on Amazon. In recent years, as a result ... more Click here for a PDF version. Click here to buy the book on Amazon. In recent years, as a result of broad concerns about climate change, food, the deterioration in the quality of natural and human environments, and the significant impact that human beings are having upon all aspects of our physical environments, environmental thought has taken on an increasingly important place in academic and public arenas. It has also undergone a sea change in theoretical terms, strengthening its perspectives and raising important new questions. Nowadays, we are much more aware of the degree to which natural environments are products of historical and cultural processes, and the list of new and important fields for the study of human and nonhuman environments continues to grow. This rising interest is reflected by this new collection of essays on late eighteenth-and early nineteenth century British and American ecopoetics. Including solicited papers as well as papers first given at various academic conferences and then revised for publication, the volume offers a fairly broad range of essays on Romantic ecocriticism of varying quality and importance. The editor, Dewey H. Hall, has assembled a collection that speaks to both academics and students. The collection might have been a little more unified, however, if he had encouraged the authors to refer to each other's contributions. Also, Hall somewhat overstates the focus of the book when he argues-in the introduction-that its orientation is uniquely transatlantic and transhistorical. What Hall appears to mean by these terms is not theoretical models that seek to think across periods and national boundaries, but instead comparative studies, made between authors living in different places (i.e. Britain and America) and different times (less clear, since transhistorical seems to be used even when writers are referring to their contemporaries). Nevertheless, in showing how literary writers drew upon science and natural history, these essays are clearly interdisciplinary. Overall, then, this volume is both a welcome addition to current scholarship on ecocriticism and a valuable contribution to Romantic literary criticism.
British Romanticism, Climate Change, and the Anthropocene, 2017
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this p... more The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
This article concerns the question of influence evident in the transatlantic relationship between... more This article concerns the question of influence evident in the transatlantic relationship between William Wordsworth and Ralph Waldo Emerson. I argue that influence is linked vitally to light—celestial or the northern lights (i.e. aurora borealis)—, which is evident in the prose and poetry by Wordsworth and Emerson. Electromagnetic energy conducts a circuit; this is reflected also in the transatlantic crosscurrent of the precursor and progeny. Notably, Wordsworth’s “The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman” (1798) and his Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802) influence Emerson’s The Poet (1844), which has been informed also by Michael Faraday’s Experimental Researches in Electricity (1839). The matter pertaining to influence is inextricably connected to electromagnetism, light, and aurora borealis that appear in the work by Wordsworth and Emerson. Inspiration, then, ultimately can be derived from a celestial source in relation to the terrestrial.
... Gay, John. The Beggar's Opera. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Restorati... more ... Gay, John. The Beggar's Opera. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Restoration and The Eighteenth Century. Vol. 1C. Ed. ... Inchbald, Elizabeth. Every One Has His Fault. TheBroadview Anthology of Romantic Drama. Ed. Jeffrey N. Cox and Michael Gamer. ...
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