Teaching Romantic Ecology in Northern Canada

Abstract

Since the publication of Jonathan Bate’s Romantic Ecology in 1991, scholars have increasingly sought to reframe British Romanticism in light of environmental history, creating in the process the field of inquiry known as ‘Green Romanticism’ or ‘Romantic Ecology’. Exploring trends in this field,1 I have developed an undergraduate seminar at the University of Northern British Columbia that encourages students to consider, from an ecocritical perspective, Romanticera responses to such topics as Enlightenment science and natural history, urbanisation and industrialisation, conservation, environmental ethics and animal welfare. During our 13-week semester, the class addresses a number of overarching questions: does Romanticism provide an ethical alternative to traditional anthropocentric concepts of nature, or is the literature’s emphasis upon imagination itself thoroughly human-centred? How do the Romantics’ generic experiments inform their responses to nature? What are the environmental implications of aesthetic categories like the sublime, the beautiful and the picturesque? How do Romantic concepts of nature engage with hegemonic models of gender, race and class? By asking such questions, I aim to help my students appreciate Romanticism’s contributions to environmental history and to understand some of the ways in which Romantic thought continues to inform modern-day environmentalist theory and practice.