Wild Romanticism (Routledge Environmental Literature, Culture and Media)

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 twelve 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.

Markus Poetzsch is Associate Professor of English at Wilfrid Laurier University, where he specializes in British Romantic literature and ecocriticism. He is the author of Visionary Dreariness: Readings in Romanticism’s Quotidian Sublime and has published essays on John Clare, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Thomas De Quincey, Leigh Hunt, and Henry David Thoreau. His research considers intersecting themes, such as aesthetics and landscape gardening, pedestrianism and loco-description, anthropocentrism and ornithology, poetics, and ethics.

Cassandra Falke is Professor of English Literature at UiT – The Arctic University of Norway. Her books include Phenomenology and the Broken Body (co-ed. 2019), The Phenomenology of Love and Reading (2016), Literature by the Working Class: English Autobiography, 1820–1848 (2013), and Intersections in Christianity and Critical Theory (ed. 2010). She has published essays on romanticism, phenomenology, education, and the role of the reader. Her current project discusses acts of reading in light of recent theorizations of complicity.