| In recent years, ecocritics have highlighted the Romantics' interest in regional ecologies, arguing that writers responded to revolution and industrialization by celebrating the local. Yet strikingly, Romantic depictions of familiar landscapes often invoke unfamiliar settings, including settings that writers had only read about or seen in paintings. "Placing Natures" explains this paradox by exploring the role that foreign and imaginary settings play in Romantic representations of landscape. I argue that the Romantics wrote about nature in order to reconcile their direct observations of nature and their encounters with mediated natures. In so doing, I contend, they arrived at new methods for defining "place" as well as new criteria for valorizing the English countryside. "Placing Natures" builds on scholarship by Raymond Williams, John Barrell, and others that traces the emergence of "countryside" as a repository for nationalist and anti-modern fantasies. Instead of viewing Romantic landscapes as wholly idealized (in the way these critics do) or wholly mimetic (in the way many ecocritics do) I argue that Romantic landscapes are simultaneously realistic and rhetorical, the byproducts of first-hand observation and studied comparison. In chapters on William Wordsworth, Charlotte Smith, and Mary Shelley, I demonstrate how each author used landscape to develop new definitions of place. In the final chapter, I outline a method for teaching Romantic representations of nature that better supports the goals of contemporary environmental education than other forms of ecopedagogy. I propose that instead of using Romantic texts to model "green" attitudes, we should use these texts to explore how cultures arrive at the criteria for valuing particular environments. |
