Green Romanticism

The British Romantic movement, it has been said, produced the first “full-fledged ecological writers in the Western literary tradition.” To make this claim, however, is to provoke a host of volatile questions. What exactly did Romantics mean by “nature”? What were the aesthetic, scientific, and political implications of so-called Green Romanticism? Most provocatively, is modern environmental thought a continuation of Green Romanticism—or a necessary reaction against it? This course considers such issues through the prism of late 18th and early 19th-century British literature, with additional forays into contemporary art and scientific writing, as well as German and American literature. Possible areas of discussion may include the following: leveling politics, landscape design, Romantic idealism, colonial exploration and exploitation, astronomy and the visionary imagination, “peasant poetry,” vegetarianism, the sex life of plants, breastfeeding, ballooning, deism, sublime longings, organic form, and the republic of nature—with works by Edmund Burke, William Gilpin, Dorothy and William Wordsworth, John Clare, Percy and Mary Shelley, Charlotte Smith, Charles Darwin, and John Keats, among others.