Leigh Hunt's New Suburbia: An Eco-historical Study in Climate Poetics and Public Health

Abstract

We should plan our ideal city by considering four principles. The first and most indispensable of these is health. The “irregular advance” of ecocriticism, as Lawrence Buell notes, has meant the absence of any consistent, identifiable method, particularly with regard to ecocriticism's historical modes (17). “Green history,” in Richard Kerridge's words, “is tricky terrain” (7). The estrangement of ecocriticism and historiography originated with the antihistoricist polemic of seminal early texts of ecocriticism, by Jonathan Bate, Karl Kroeber, and Glen Love, for example, which challenged historicist criticism for its skepticism toward nature writing and would-be exposure of the ideological construction of “nature” as such. Eco-historicism, as I have defined it elsewhere, proposes a clearer ecocritical methodology, while attempting to avoid the forms of anthropocentrism and narrow material determinism that attracted such criticisms.1 That is, eco-historicism reclaims historicist practice for the environmental critic, but with an emphasis on archive-rich historical reconstruction and discourse analysis, and less focus on critique as an end in itself. The eco-historical method is straightforward. The eco-historicist begins by posing a question about a complex environmental issue of the twenty-first century, then looks to a historical case study for insights. And what is culture, in its specialized sense, to the eco-historical method? Because the work of writers is routinely proleptic of technical and disciplinary treatises on socio-ecological subjects, literary texts, no less than paintings, architecture, landscape design, and other cultural artifacts, are indispensable to the task of constructing the relevant eco-historical narrative. As we shall see in the example of Leigh Hunt's poems on suburban life in Regency London, writers experiment with conceptual languages for the inchoate phenomena of their environments, built and natural.