Reclaiming Romanticism : Towards an Ecopoetics of Decolonization
Author(s): Kate Rigby
This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com.
The earliest environmental criticism took its inspiration from the Romantic poets and their immersion in the natural world. Today the “romanticising” of nature has come to be viewed with suspicion. Written by one of the leading ecocritics writing today, Reclaiming Romanticism rediscovers the importance of the European Romantic tradition to the ways that writers and critics engage with the environment in the Anthropocene era. Exploring the work of such poets as Wordsworth, Shelley and Clare, the book discovers a rich vein of Romantic ecomaterialism and brings these canonical poets into dialogue with contemporary American and Australian poets and artists. Kate Rigby demonstrates the ways in which Romantic ecopoetics responds to postcolonial challenges and environmental peril to offer a collaborative artistic practice for an era of human-non-human cohabitation and kinship.
Review(s):
“In this elegantly written study from within the ecological humanities, Kate Rigby addresses the complex inheritances of Romanticism in what she calls the 'perilous present'… With its depth of historical knowledge of Romantic discourse… and its breadth of understanding of the afterlives of Romanticism in decolonising and Indigenous contexts, particularly North American and Australian, these readings are exemplary of literary scholarship in touch with urgent contemporary realities. Rigby's decolonising ecopoetics shows us, with an impressive grasp of intellectual history and theoretical power, how artistic movements like Romanticism are able to inform our grappling with the crises of the present.” —Philip Mead, Professor Emeritus, The University of Western Australia, Australia
ISBN: 9781474290593