Ecology and the Literature of the British Left

The Red and the Green

H. Gustav Klaus, Valentine Cunningham, John Rignall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317146315
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Premised on the belief that a social and an ecological agenda are compatible, this collection offers readings in the ecology of left and radical writing from the Romantic period to the present. While early ecocriticism tended to elide the bitter divisions within and between societies, recent practitioners of ecofeminism, environmental justice, and social ecology have argued that the social, the economic and the environmental have to be seen as part of the same process. Taking up this challenge, the contributors trace the origins of an environmental sensibility and of the modern left to their roots in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, charting the ways in which the literary imagination responds to the political, industrial and agrarian revolutions. Topics include Samuel Taylor Coleridge's credentials as a green writer, the interaction between John Ruskin's religious and political ideas and his changing view of nature, William Morris and the Garden City movement, H. G. Wells and the Fabians, the devastated landscapes in the poetry and fiction of the First World War, and the leftist pastoral poetry of the 1930s. In historicizing and connecting environmentally sensitive literature with socialist thought, these essays explore the interactive vision of nature and society in the work of writers ranging from William Wordsworth and John Clare to John Berger and John Burnside.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Red and the Green
• 1 Contemporary Ecocriticism between Red and Green
• 2 Was Coleridge Green?
• 3 ‘Wastes of corn’: Changes in Rural Land Use in Wordsworth’s Early Poetry
• 4 John Clare’s Weeds
• 5 John Clare & … & … & … Deleuze and Guattari’s Rhizome
• 6 Graeco-Roman Pastoral and Social Class in Arthur Hugh Clough’s Bothie and Thomas Hardy’s Under The Greenwood Tree
• 7 Landscape, Labour and History in Later Nineteenth-Century Writing
• 8 Fallen Nature: Ruskin’s Political Apocalypse
• 9 William Morris and the Garden City
• 10 H.G. Wells, Fabianism and the ‘Shape of Things to Come’
• 11 Guardianship and Fellowship: Radicalism and the Ecological Imagination 1880–1940
• 12 Felled Trees—Fallen Soldiers
• 13 Marxist Cricket? Some Versions of Pastoral in the Poetry of the Thirties
• 14 Eco-anarchism, the New Left and Romanticism
• 15 A Huge Lacuna vis-à-vis the Peasants: Red and Green in John Berger’s Trilogy Into Their Labours
• 16 Green Links: Ecosocialism and Contemporary Scottish Writing
• Bibliography
• Index