ENGL 670 Studies in Literature:
The Green 19th Century:
This seminar surveys 19th-century British Literature through an ecocritical lens. The practice of ecocriticism has three main tasks: 1) to read and bring under scholarly scrutiny works with a focus on the natural world or environmental concerns; 2) to analyze the representation of the natural world in a wide spectrum of texts; and 3) to explore the historical and cultural construction of the terms “nature” and “natural.” So in this course we will focus on representations of the natural world and consider how writers and readers of the era understood their relationship to and place in that world. In so doing, we will scrutinize changing constructions of “nature” and “natural” with the further goal of better understanding how these definitions had broad social implications with respect to scientific inquiry, industrialization, imperialism and gender politics. Authors studied will include Mary Shelley, Emily Bronte, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, and Charles Darwin, along with selected Romantic and Victorian poets.