Overview
First major literary-critical study of the relationship between climate change and British Romanticism
Challenges the critical tendency to understand Romantic nature writing as largely apolitical and concerned with individual and local experience
Looks at many of the key Romantic figures: the Shelleys, Byron and Coleridge
Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras
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Table of contents (4 chapters)
Keywords
About this book
This book is the first major ecocritical study of the relationship between British Romanticism and climate change. It analyses a wide range of texts – by authors including Lord Byron, William Cobbett, Sir Stamford Raffles, Mary Shelley, and Percy Shelley – in relation to the global crisis produced by the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815. By connecting these texts to current debates in the environmental humanities, it reveals the value of a historicized approach to the Anthropocene. British Romanticism, Climate Change, and the Anthropocene examines how Romantic texts affirm the human capacity to shape and make sense of a world with which we are profoundly entangled and at the same time represent our humiliation by powerful elemental forces that we do not fully comprehend. It will appeal not only to scholars of British Romanticism, but to anyone interested in the relationship between culture and climate change.
Reviews
“Marking Time: Romanticism and Evolution, provides a perceptive contribution to the scholarship linking Romanticism to the study of natural philosophy and natural history, especially evolution. The volume features leading researchers, many of whom have written significant monographs in the past.” (Dewey W. Hall, European Romantic Review, Vol. 30 (1), 2019)
“Combining Romanticist and ecocritical research, David Higgins shows just how and why literary scholars should be reading ecological and cultural histories in tandem. This is a historically rigorous and theoretically informed account of the Tambora eruption and the material and discursive networks that informed, and continue to inform, our response to it. It brings together historical accounts, Romantic poetry, scientific observations and data, with an entirely up-to-date critical approach. The result is intelligent, informative, and thoroughly readable.” (Adeline Johns-Putra, Reader in English Literature at University of Surrey, UK)Authors and Affiliations
About the author
David Higgins is Associate Professor in English Literature at the University of Leeds, UK. He has published widely on Romantic literature and culture, including the monographs Romantic Genius and the Literary Magazine and Romantic Englishness, and the co-edited collection Jean-Jacques Rousseau and British Romanticism.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: British Romanticism, Climate Change, and the Anthropocene
Book Subtitle: Writing Tambora
Authors: David Higgins
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67894-8
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-67893-1Published: 30 November 2017
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-319-88505-6Published: 01 September 2018
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-67894-8Published: 20 November 2017
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: IX, 142
Number of Illustrations: 2 b/w illustrations
Topics: Nineteenth-Century Literature, Eighteenth-Century Literature, British and Irish Literature, Climate Change