Lexington Books
Pages: 304
•
Trim: 6¼ x 9¼
978-1-4985-1890-1 • Hardback • December 2015 • $133.00 • (£102.00)
978-1-4985-1892-5 • Paperback • July 2017 • $60.99 • (£47.00)
978-1-4985-1891-8 • eBook • December 2015 • $57.50 • (£44.00)
Ben P. Robertson is professor of English at Troy University.
List of Illustrations
Abbreviations
Introduction
Part I: Inspiration and the Imagination
Chapter 1: Coleridge’s “Deep Romantic Chasm”: Kubla Khan, the Valley of Rocks, and the Geomorphological Imagination
Adrian J. Wallbank
Chapter 2: Strict Machine: The DILLIAM Eco-Loop
Michael Angelo Tata
Chapter 3: Romantic Clouds: Climate, Affect, Hyperobjects
Seth T. Reno
Chapter 4: “In Some Untrodden Region of My Mind”: Mental Landscapes in Keats’s Poetry Huey-fen Fay Yao
Part II: Diets and Consumption
Chapter 5: Sublime Diets: Percy Shelley’s Radical Consumption
Madison Percy Jones
Chapter 6: The Bloodless Church: Dualist Asceticism and Romantic Vegetarianism
Emily Paterson-Morgan
Chapter 7: The Horror of Starvation: Sustainability in Allan Cunningham’s and John Francis Campbell’s Supernatural Tales
Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns
Part III: Alienation and Environmental Degradation
Chapter 8: First Child in the Woods: “Nature-Deficit Disorder” and the Future of Romantic Childhood
William Stroup
Chapter 9: “The Temple of Folly”: Transatlantic “Nature,” Nabobs, and Environmental Degradation in The Woman of Colour
Denys Van Renen
Chapter 10: A Pauper’s Sustenance: Malthusianism and John Clare’s “The Lament of Swordy Well”
Kultej Dhariwal
Part IV: Beasts and Monsters
Chapter 11: Masculinity, Monstrosity, and Sustainability in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
Avishek Parui
Chapter 12: The Monsters of Zocotora: Negotiating a Sustainable Identity through the Environment in Elizabeth Inchbald’s Nature and Art
Ben P. Robertson
Chapter 13: Wollstonecraft—Unnatural Woman: Between the Nature of the Feminine and a Gendered Nature
Molly Hall
Part V: Extinction and Apocalypse
Chapter 14: Shelley and the Limits of Sustainability
Adam R. Rosenthal
Chapter 15: Apocalypse Not Quite: Romanticism and the Post-Human World
Olivia Murphy
Chapter 16: Questioning Agency: Dehumanizing Sustainability in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man
Lauren Cameron
About the Contributors
Index
Robertson offers a diverse collection of applied ecocritical essays, written by an international group of contributors from five continents, that focus on both traditional and less-known Romantic texts. One of the primary strengths of ecocriticism is its adaptability to a wide variety of purposes and strategies, and these essays forge innovative links between environmental sustainability and considerations such as race, gender, religion, and identity, and also 19th-century developments in science and technology. Robertson, who also edited The Travel Writings of John Moore (4v., 2014), organizes the collection around broad themes that range from the environment as imaginative inspiration to nightmares of extinction and apocalypse. Notable contributions include Molly Hall’s ecofeminist reading of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Denys Van Renen’s analysis of the intersection of race and the environment in the anonymously written The Woman of Colour. Marked by theoretical sophistication and including meticulous scholarly apparatus, this accessible, groundbreaking collection should strongly influence the next generation of Romantic scholarship. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.
— Choice Reviews
[These essays] offer some striking new approaches to familiar texts and introduce us to hitherto overlooked or neglected ones. . . .[The book] move[s] Romantic ecocriticism into generative theoretical territory, and…point[s] to one thing for certain: Erasmus Darwin’s star is rising.
— European Romantic Review