Abstract
In both her prose writing and her poetry the Irish writer Emily Lawless (1845-1913) considers a number of environmental subjects, from mothing and dredging for shellfish and mollusks to gardening and the decline of the Irish woodland. A recurrent theme in her poetry is the concern for threatened environment, but dystopian images are balanced by portrayals of landscape as a source of spiritual wisdom and healing. Lawless’s focus is often on more insignificant examples of the natural world such as moths, crustaceans or bog-cotton rather than more conventional representations of natural beauty. Lawless was a Darwinist, and several of her poems thematise the interaction between the human and the natural world, frequently reversing the power relationship between humans and natural phenomena. A re-contextualisation of her poetry within the framework of nineteenth-century natural history, Darwinism and early ecological thought brings to the fore her exploration of the connections between nature, self and national belonging.
Highlights
In both her prose writing and her poetry the Irish writer Emily Lawless (1845-1913) considers a number of environmental subjects, from mothing and dredging for shellfish and mollusks to gardening and the decline of the Irish woodland
From a present-day eco-critical perspective, on the other hand, the rejection of symbolism in favour of representations of the natural world as real seems remarkably progressive. In both her prose writing and her poetry Lawless considers a number of environmental subjects, from mothing and dredging for shellfish and mollusks to gardening and the decline of the Irish woodland
Enumerating topics researched in ecocriticism, Cheryll Glotfelty includes the question whether the values expressed in a particular text are “consistent with ecological wisdom” (Glotfelty 1996: xix)
Summary
In both her prose writing and her poetry the Irish writer Emily Lawless (1845-1913) considers a number of environmental subjects, from mothing and dredging for shellfish and mollusks to gardening and the decline of the Irish woodland. At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, the Irish writer Emily Lawless (1845-1913) published a number of poems on Irish subjects, many of them concerned with the natural world.
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