Wild Romanticism

Name: Wild Romanticism
Author: Markus Poetzsch, Cassandra Falke
ISBN: 9780367496746

doi:10.4324/9780367496746

Book

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ABSTRACT

Wild Romanticism consolidates contemporary thinking about conceptions of the wild in British and European Romanticism, clarifying the emergence of wilderness as a cultural, symbolic and ecological idea.

This volume brings together the work of thirteen scholars who examine representations of wildness in canonical texts such as Frankenstein, Northanger Abbey, "Kubla Khan," "Expostulation and Reply," and Childe Harold´s Pilgrimage, as well as lesser-known works by Radcliffe, Clare, Hölderlin, P.B. Shelley and Hogg. Celebrating the wild provided Romantic-period authors with a way of thinking about nature that resists instrumentalization and anthropocentricism, but writing about wilderness also engaged them in debates about the sublime and picturesque as aesthetic categories, about gender and the cultivation of independence as natural, and about the ability of natural forces to resist categorical or literal enclosure.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Romanticism, environmental literature, environmental history and the environmental humanities more broadly.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: Wild Romanticism

Cassandra Falke and Markus Poetzsch

Weakness and Wildness in Wordsworth’s "The Brothers"

Emma Mason

Wild Freedom and Careful Wandering in the Poetry of William Wordsworth and John Clare

Sue Edney

Plumbing the Depths of Wildness: From the Picturesque to John Clare

Markus Poetzsch

Savage, Holy, Enchanted: Coleridge in Concert with the Wild

Gregory Leadbetter

Human Grapes in the Wine-Presses: Vegetable Life and the Violence of Cultivation in Blake’s Milton

Tristanne Connolly

Wild Plants and Wild Passions in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Poems for Jane Williams

Cian Duffy

Wilding Europe and Childe Harold´s Pilgrimage

Cassandra Falke

Hölderlin, Heidegger, and Hyperobjects

William Davis

"Almost Wild": Jane Austen’s Dirtiest of Heroines

Colin Carman

"Wild above rule or art": Volcanic Luxuriance, Subterranean Terror, and the Nature of Gender in Ann Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance

James Lesslie

"A strange unearthly climate": James Hogg’s Tale of the Arctic Wild

Robert W. Rix

"Vast and Irregular Plains of Ice": Wilderness as Smooth Space in Frankenstein

Mirka Horová

Index