Romanticism and the Materiality of Nature

Romanticism and the Materiality of Nature PDF

Author: Onno Oerlemans

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2004-01-01

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 9780802086976

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

Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology

Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology PDF

Author: Noah Heringman

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2011-02-23

Total Pages: 327

ISBN-13: 0801457513

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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

Romantic Sustainability PDF

Author: Ben P. Robertson

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2015-12-24

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 1498518915

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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

Romanticism and Speculative Realism PDF

Author: Chris Washington

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2019-01-24

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 1501336398

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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

Romantic Ecocriticism PDF

Author: Dewey W. Hall

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2016-03-15

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 1498518028

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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.

Passions for Nature

Passions for Nature PDF

Author: Rochelle Johnson

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 660

ISBN-13: 0820332895

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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.

A Handbook of Romanticism Studies

A Handbook of Romanticism Studies PDF

Author: Joel Faflak

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2016-01-19

Total Pages: 440

ISBN-13: 1119129613

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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

Romanticism, Medicine and the Natural Supernatural

Romanticism, Medicine and the Natural Supernatural PDF

Author: Gavin Budge

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2012-10-17

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 1137284315

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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.

Poetry and Animals

Poetry and Animals PDF

Author: Onno Oerlemans

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2018-03-06

Total Pages: 227

ISBN-13: 0231547420

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Why do poets write about animals? What can poetry do for animals and what can animals do for poetry? In some cases, poetry inscribes meaning on animals, turning them into symbols or caricatures and bringing them into the confines of human culture. It also reveals and revels in the complexity of animals. Poetry, through its great variety and its inherently experimental nature, has embraced the multifaceted nature of animals to cross, blur, and reimagine the boundaries between human and animal. In Poetry and Animals, Onno Oerlemans explores a broad range of English-language poetry about animals from the Middle Ages to the contemporary world. He presents a taxonomy of kinds of animal poems, breaking down the categories and binary oppositions at the root of human thinking about animals. The book considers several different types of poetry: allegorical poems, poems about “the animal” broadly conceived, poems about species of animal, poems about individual animals or the animal as individual, and poems about hybrids and hybridity. Through careful readings of dozens of poems that reveal generous and often sympathetic approaches to recognizing and valuing animals’ difference and similarity, Oerlemans demonstrates how the forms and modes of poetry can sensitize us to the moral standing of animals and give us new ways to think through the problems of the human-animal divide.

The Soul in British Romanticism

The Soul in British Romanticism PDF

Author: Ralf Haekel

Publisher:

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 9783868215274

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The Soul in British Romanticism provides a history of the modern concept of the human and the nascence of the human sciences during the long eighteenth century as well as a theory of Romantic poetry. The book investigates the forms and functions of the human soul from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century: during the Enlightenment, the traditional notion of an immortal and immaterial soul was replaced by immanent concepts such as vitalism, the nervous system and the brain. In the course of this development, the key faculties associated with the soul - transcendence, immortality and imagination - were increasingly negotiated in poetry. Thus, the transformation of the soul, leading to a fundamentally new and different understanding of what it is to be human, also created a new conception of the medium of literature. Romantic poetry tries to recapture the lost qualities of the human soul in and through the creative imagination which becomes the essence of poetry and a warranty of art's transcendence and immortality. On the other hand, this triggers a reflection on the immanent and material basis of poetry because, paradoxically, the constant reference to transcendence in immanence ultimately leads to a profound reflection on language, texture and on the materiality of the medium of poetry. Through this medial self-reflexivity, Romantic poetry becomes the first form of modern literature.