Studies in the 19th Century

Romanticism was once defined as a turn toward “nature” in response to the industrialization marking Western Europe’s transition to modern capitalism in the early nineteenth century.  Rather than simply resurrecting the idea of the Romantic poets as “nature” poets, we will carefully examine Romantic figures of reflection and grounding, dispersal and dwelling, while also searching for alternatives to the curative role often assigned both “nature” and “poetry” in environmentalist criticism.  Topics will include: the gendering of “nature”; the persistence of commoning practices within industrial modernity; agriculture as a border-space between “culture” and “nature”; the role of memory and imagination in the sense of place and the loss of place; weather-reporting, plant-study and other practices of attention; fantasies about ecological disaster, social catastrophe, and science’s ability to save or destroy humankind.  

As we compare different definitions of “nature”—as a set of finite, exploitable resources, a normative authority limiting human experimentation, a repository of traditional ways of doing and knowing, and a site of vulnerability in need of protection from extinction—we will also explore the alternatives to the nature/human binary developed by the writers in question.  Our readings will traverse British, North American, German and French contexts and will include works by Rousseau, Goethe, Blake, Coleridge, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Percy Shelley, Clare, Thoreau, Freud, Heidegger, Adorno and Horkheimer.