ABSTRACT

In a similar manner to the discussion in Chapter 3, this chapter reassess the literary significance of sundials, an even older pre-industrial horological device that enjoyed a late flourishing in the eighteenth century. Being human-made cultural objects designed to manifest natural diurnal regularities, sundials were deemed to be less artificial, and more reliable, than either mechanical timepieces or sandglasses. Indeed, when clocks and watches proved aberrant (as they often did), sundials provided the primary means of readjusting accurately. While some critics have assumed that literary sundials necessarily betoken reactionary nostalgia, this chapter shows that they were more commonly deployed to articulate profound anxieties about the relationship between human culture and the natural environment. Therefore, the following sections offer a detailed ecocritical reading of important gnomonic concerns in the works of William Cowper, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, William Hazlitt, and others.