Romantic sustainability : endurance and the natural world, 1780-1830 / edited by Ben P. Robertson.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

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.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Robertson (Troy Univ.) 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. --Ronald D. Morrison, Morehead State University