Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism: Toward Urbanatural Roosting (review)

Abstract

Nichols, Ashton. 2011. Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism: Toward Urbanatural Roosting. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. $85.00. hc. xxiii + 230 pp.In recent years ecological literary criticism has moved from the margins of the academy to become an increasingly mainstream mode of analysis, nowhere more so than in Romanticist circles. Early new historicist scholarship in the 1980s tended to view Romantic writing about nature as evading fields of social, economic, and political struggle. Beginning in the 1990s, Jonathan Bate, Karl Kroeber, Lawrence Buell, James McKusick, and others sought to reassert the primacy of nature in the Romantic enterprise and to retrieve Romantic environmental thought as a foundation for a new ecopolitics appropriate to the age of global warming. Yet Romantic ecocriticism risked becoming as rigid as the new historicist skepticism it displaced, giving us a version of the Romantics that largely echoes twenty-first-century ecological sensibilities, and so inviting a new wave of critical and revisionary accounts. The most prominent recent intervention in Romantic ecocriticism has been led by Timothy Morton, who in a pair of influential books-Ecology Without (2007) and The Ecological Thought (2010)-challenged the basic assumptions of virtually all ecological thought, mainstream and radical, of the last two centuries. Morton argues that the concept of is an aestheticized abstraction that feeds into anthropocentric fantasies of domination, and has done more ecological harm than good.Ashton Nichols's Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism enters this contested terrain with a call for an environmental criticism grounded in what he calls urbanature. Although Nichols's book is less iconoclastic towards mainstream ecocriticism than Morton's work, the two authors share a suspicion towards the concept of Nature as it has traditionally been applied. The conventional view of nature denotes wilderness; spaces are to the extent that they are uninhabited, or unaffected, by human beings, and correspondingly spaces that have been cultivated or transformed by human activity are unnatural. In accord with much recent ecocritical work, Nichols rejects this view of nature as something apart from and inherently imperiled by human civilization, and instead uses the term urbanature to articulate the idea that human beings are never cut offfrom wild nature by human culture (xv). Where Morton argues that ecocriticism needs to cast offthe concept of nature altogether, Nichols argues for expanding our sense of nature to encompass human beings and the spaces we cultivate and developWhile Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism is certainly invested in these theoretical debates, it is less a polemical work than, in some ways, a reflective memoir, structured around Nichols's own lyrical, essayistic observations and musings on his encounters with nature over the course of a year. It is divided into four principal sections of three chapters each, corresponding to the seasons and months of the year, and begins and ends with the coming of spring in March. The close attention to natural description and to the author's situatedness in and around nature has become a familiar trope in ecocritical scholarship, as a sort of corrective to the tendency to divorce scholarship from embodied experience. In Nichols's hands, though, this technique never feels cliched. Rather, the more coloristic passages of natural writing flow seamlessly into his readings of literary texts and material history, echoing Wordsworth's claim that our two great spiritual teachers are books and nature.Like many works of ecocriticism, Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism is really two books in one: a descriptive cultural-historical study of the evolution of ideas about nature over the course of the nineteenth century, and a normative argument about what lessons these works offer in framing a social and political response to our current ecological crisis. …