Nature on the Move

Abstract

Nature On The Move Onno Oerlemans (bio) Natures in Translation: Romanticism and Colonial Natural History by Alan Bewell. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. 393 Pp.. $60.00 cloth. As Alan Bewell says in the beginning of his rich and meticulous new book, "The centrality of nature during the Romantic period is obvious, but surely modern readers have some right to complain that enough has been said and written about it" (2–3). There is indeed a high bar for critics seeking to add to our understanding of Romantic interests in the natural world; the problems are large and multiple, and have thus attracted more than a century's worth of critical commentary. Surely there is nothing new under the sun on this topic. Romantic conceptions of nature have profoundly affected modernity but are also rooted in specific historical and cultural moments, already far enough in the past that they require ever more concerted efforts of historicism to add nuance and insight. Even the debates initiated by New Historicism's dismissal of the centrality of nature to Romanticism, and the various rebuttals by ecocritics and others, are themselves now old news. The dust has settled. Both are right. Nature matters, and so does culture, and we know what there is to know. Moreover, "nature" is itself now a very tired word, one that we might do well to banish from our collective vocabularies, along with "reality," "art," and perhaps "discourse." We don't really know what we mean when we use the word, and even less when others use it. These [End Page 135] words are weak stand-ins for something broad and vague and abstract and wearying. Nature is the world, physical (Wordsworth's "rocks and stones and trees") and vaguely spiritual (Coleridge's "one Life within us and abroad"). Moreover, it's difficult to know, in the face of the impending catastrophes of climate change, mass extinctions, and the erasure of habitat, why or how the study of Romanticism and its varying understandings of the natural world might still matter. This is especially true if, as Bewell also notes, "nature," however we understand it, matters less to most of us than it used to. We are "post-nature"; we consume it, but we don't collectively care to understand or preserve it, and it's not very clear in any case how literary criticism of any kind can intervene to make us care. The good news is that Bewell rises to all of these challenges. His previous work has been scrupulously interdisciplinary and factual, exploring complex intersections of cultural, environmental, medical, and other kinds of history with literary texts. This latest book is his best yet—the broadest and most theoretical, the most ambitious and field-altering, and also the most inspiring for those seeking new and exciting ways of thinking not just about the natural world and Romanticism, but also about how we might turn our critical and scholarly insights into ways of thinking about the world as it exists around us in the here and now. Bewell's argument seems at first quite simple: that while "we talk as if there were only one nature," there are in fact a plurality of natures …: that the natural world in its general meaning is composed of many natures that are materially, historically, and culturally distinct from one another, that these natures can succeed or evolve in relation to each other across time and space, and that a given environment can be composed, like a society, of many different and often competing natures, reflecting different social relationships and values. (12–13) Bewell is interested in a genealogy of natures, not in the abstract, but as revealed through cultural records. A nature is not just a community or set of organisms bounded geographically to a specific landscape but as understood, lived in, explored, colonized, protected, or destroyed by people, who are also a part of the world. "Politics, in other words, are embedded in natures, and natures embedded in politics, behaviors, and ideas" (13). More interestingly, modernity itself involves a growing awareness of the nature of natures, both through the advancement of science, and through our other [End Page 136...