ABSTRACT
The Radical Ecology of the Shelleys seeks to diversify the theoretical basis of ecocriticism and to open up a whole new basis for understanding the merger of the natural and the social. As a bulwark against the Age of Man, and the hegemony of the straight man, and their double threats to social justice and futurity, the Shelleys espoused a queer ecology – an even richer and more progressive development of Murray Bookchin’s conception of social ecology. By conceiving of a queer ecology, Morton was only deepening the degree to which nature is politicized in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s thought. Modern-day readers may find Shelley’s ventriloquizing of a cloud trite or even ridiculously “romantic,” but the motif is a meaningful one in light of the fact that the ideology that nature is separate from human culture only accelerates man’s destruction of life on earth. Sexuality was a new source of inquiry during the Romantic period with boundaries that were ill-defined.
