Romanticism and Nature

The Romantic period marks, for Timothy Morton, “the beginning of environmental ways of understanding and acting.” The focus of this seminar is nature as it is portrayed in the poetic works of writers like P.B. Shelley, S.T. Coleridge, W. Wordsworth, and others. Our guiding questions will be why is nature such a prominent topic in the Romantic corpus? How was nature conceived/constructed by the Romantics, in connection with the Romantic subject? How might one read Romantic poetry in the age of environmental crisis and how has Romantic poetry contributed to the discourse around ecology in the present? For the latter question we will be looking at contemporary ecology-informed readings of the Romantics; we will also contextualize Romantic nature writing by touching on the impact of industrialization and capitalism, some of the political and social debates of the time, as well as natural science and philosophy.