William Wordsworth and the Ecology of Authorship

The Roots of Environmentalism in Nineteenth-Century Culture

Scott Hess

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780813932309
• eBook ISBN: 9780813932316
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism & Nature
• Index: Literature

In William Wordsworth and the Ecology of Authorship, Scott Hess explores Wordsworth's defining role in establishing what he designates as "the ecology of authorship": a primarily middle-class, nineteenth-century conception of nature associated with aesthetics, high culture, individualism, and nation. Instead of viewing Wordsworth as an early ecologist, Hess places him within a context that is largely cultural and aesthetic. The supposedly universal Wordsworthian vision of nature, Hess argues, was in this sense specifically male, middle-class, professional, and culturally elite—factors that continue to shape the environmental movement today.

NOTES

Introduction

1. Mackay, Scenery and Poetry.

2. Mackay, Scenery and Poetry, 144.

3. Prelude 1.7, 23. All subsequent quotations from William Wordsworth’s poetry are cited by line number from the main reading text of the standard Cornell editions of Wordsworth, unless otherwise indicated. For poems where alternative reading texts exist, I have used the 1805 version of The Prelude; the 1793 published versions of An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches; MS B of Home at Grasmere; and MS D of The Ruined Cottage, unless noted otherwise.

4. On the use of nature in advertisement, see for instance Daniel Harris, Cute, Quaint, Hungry, 179–208.

5. On the social constitution of the environmental movement, see Schutkin, Land That Could Be, and Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring.

6. See for instance Cronon, Uncommon Ground; Corner, Recovering Landscape; Cosgrove, Social Formation; DeLue and Elkins, Landscape Theory; and Wylie, Landscape, for a few among many relevant works.

7. See especially Raymond Williams, Country and the City, and Barrell, Idea of Landscape and Dark Side of the Landscape.

8. Bate, Romantic Ecology, 9.

9. Bate, Song of the Earth, 205.

10. In addition to the sources listed in note 6, above, see Timothy Morton’s critique of the term “nature” in Ecology without Nature.

11. Bate, Song of the Earth, 42.

12. In addition to Cronon in Uncommon Ground, see for instance Macnaghten and Urry, Contested Natures, who write that “strictly speaking there is no such thing as nature, only natures” (22).

13. Bate, Romantic Ecology, 56.

14. On “politics of location,” see Rich, Arts of the Possible, 62–82.

15. Liu, Wordsworth: Sense of History, see esp. 15; McGann, Romantic Ideology; and Levinson, Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems.

16. On this class construction of aesthetics, see Barrell, “Public Prospect.”

17. See Mattick, Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics.

18. On these gender associations of the sublime, see Bohls, Women Travel Writers, and Labbe, Romantic Visualities.

19. Bate, Romantic Ecology, 40.

20. See Barrell, “Public Prospect,” and Labbe, Romantic Visualities.

21. Bate, Song of the Earth, 149.

22. For a critique of environmental literary criticism’s invocation of holism and harmony as not matching contemporary scientific understandings, see Phillips, Truth of Ecology.

23. See Bate, Romantic Ecology, 36–40, on the origins of the word “ecology” from nineteenth-century science. The term, according to Bate, was coined by the German scientist Ernst Haeckel in 1867; the OED’s first listing in English comes in 1876.

24. See Raymond Williams, “Ideas of Nature,” esp. 70–71.

25. For an introduction to the deep ecology movement, see Sessions, Deep Ecology. Andrew McLaughlin, “The Heart of Deep Ecology,” 85–93 in this source, conveniently summarizes deep ecology’s eight-point platform.

26. For specific allusion to deep ecology, see Bate, Song of the Earth, 37–38, 138; and McKusick, Green Writing, 12, 85, 147, 174, 183–84, 193. Kroeber’s ‘Home at Grasmere’ ” precedes the deep ecology movement but expresses similar positions, as does his later Ecological Literary. The special 1996 issue of Studies in Romanticism, Green Romanticism, edited by Bate, is dominated by deep ecology both in name and in spirit.

27. See Plumwood, “Ecosocial Feminism as a General Theory of Oppression,” in Merchant, Ecology, 207–19, and Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature.

28. For some of these critiques of deep ecology, see chaps. 20 and 25 of Merchant, Ecology; Plumwood, Feminism; and Cheney, “Eco-Feminism.”

29. For an overview of these movements, in addition to the sources in notes 25 and 27, above, see Warren, Ecofeminist Philosophy; Merchant, Earthcare; Bookchin, Remaking Society; Heller, Ecology of Everyday Life; Hofrichter, Toxic Struggles; and Faber, Struggle for Ecological Democracy.

30. Giovanni di Chiro, “Nature as Community: The Convergence of Environment and Social Justice,” in Cronon, Uncommon Ground, 311, 318.

31. On this gradual social broadening of the environmental movement, see note 5, above.

32. See for instance Cronon, Uncommon Ground; Franklin, Nature and Social Theory; and Braun and Castree, Social Nature.

33. See for instance Buell, Writing for an Endangered World and Future of Environmental Criticism, as well as Garrard, Ecocriticism. On the broadening of this canon, see Anderson and Edwards, At Home on This Earth, esp. Anderson’s introduction; and Murphy, Farther Afield.

34. See for instance Keegan, Labouring-Class Nature Poetry; White, Robert Bloomfield; and Bate, John Clare.

35. On this association of nature with the authentic and the real, see Price, Flight Maps.

36. Berry, from “The Whole Horse,” in Art of the Commonplace, 236–48, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Under the Sign of Nature: Explorations in Ecocriticism
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• One • Picturesque Vision, Photographic Subjectivity, and the (Un)framing of Nature
• Two • Wordsworth Country: The Lake District and the Landscape of Genius
• Three • Wordsworth’s Environmental Protest: The Kendal and Windermere Railroad and the Cultural Politics of Nature
• Four • The Lake District and the Museum of Nature
• Five • “My Endless Way”: Travel, Gender, and the Imaginative Colonization of Nature
• Epilogue • The Ecology of Authorship versus the Ecology of Community
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index