Romantic Ecocriticism considers how natural philosophy and science informed, and sometimes influenced, 19th-century English and American Romantic writing. The essays tend to dwell on canonical figures; Wordsworth, Byron, the Shelleys, Emerson, and Thoreau play important roles in most of the essays, although the final contributions connect the Romantic movement to 20th-century environmentalism. In putting the collection together, Hall intends to erode the assumption that these Romantic writers were mere idealists by demonstrating the extent to which they drew on contemporaneous theories from the natural sciences. The essays broaden the critical context of Romantic study by traversing national boundaries to highlight thematic connections between US and English Romantic writers. The contributors range from full professors to graduate students, but essays are consistently insightful—sometimes, perhaps, more intriguing for the 19th-century scientific theories that are unveiled than for the critical insights those theories make available. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students; researchers/faculty.

Choice Reviews

This volume provides a good range of essays exploring the importance of British Romanticism--and...early nineteenth-century American literature--to contemporary ecological literary criticism.

Review 19

The volume will be of great interest to Romanticists and ecocritics alike.

European Romantic Review

Romantic Ecocriticsm is a welcome addition to the fertile and ever-expanding critical terrain shared by Romanticists and Ecocritics. Hall weaves a rich and important story.... The relationship and intersections between Romantic science and Romantic ecocriticism, surprisingly not brought together more in scholarship, was to me one of the volume’s most interesting and exciting aspects, as it illuminates not only texts and interrelations in new—modern, ecological, mesh-like—ways, but also potential new environmental ‘legacies’ and directions.

Bethan Roberts, Lancaster University, Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism

With his edited collection, Romantic Ecocriticism, Dewey Hall launches a much-needed "new wave" of eco-historical scholarship of Romanticism, one that explores ecocriticism's own historical roots in transatlantic writing of the late Georgian period. Representing a great diversity of theoretical concerns, these essays are united in two vital objectives: to break down the 'two culture' divide between ecocriticism and ecological science, and to move beyond the narrow presentism of our ecological anxieties, toward multiple encounters with geological and biological 'deep time,' the formulae for which first emerged around 1800. Romantic Ecocriticism takes us deep into the Anthropocene, and beyond.

Gillen D'Arcy Wood, University of Illinois

Romantic Ecocriticism is a forceful reminder that literature and science do not exist in isolation. These essays further establish the engagement of literary Romanticism with the major scientific and socio-theoretical debates of the period.

Rochelle Johnson, College of Idaho