William Wordsworth and the Ecology of Authorship: The Roots of Environmentalism in Nineteenth-Century Culture by Scott Hess

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS 629 I would have liked to learn more about what Kelley has to say about bo­ tanical figures in the work ofWordsworth, P. B. Shelley, and Keats, among others, but in a study in which plants teach us to follow the paths of errancy, a tightly argued book may not always be the best way to proceed. Kelley’s turn to colonial Indian botany in the subsequent chapter, which discusses the work of Sir William Jones and considers the illustrations pro­ duced by anonymous Indian artists for William Roxburgh’s Plants of the Coast of Coromandel and Flora Indica, raises interesting questions about the colonial appropriation of other natures and about voices lost in translation. In a penultimate chapter pointing toward the nineteenth-century nonLinnaean rethinking of plant morphology, Kelley provides something of a reprise of the dialectics of her book in the debate between Goethe and Hegel over the nature of plants. She then concludes with a reflection on Clare’s favorite plants, the orchids, by reflecting on James Bateman’s monograph The Orchidaceae of Mexico and Guatemala. This is a very fine work, a superb contribution to the study of the Ro­ mantic period and the relationship between botany and literature. In its deep commitment to historical understanding and to close reading, captur­ ing the figural play occasioned by the material nature of plants and their culture, Kelley’s Clandestine Marriage provides a unique account ofcomplex stirrings that lie just below the surface of the Romantic love of plants. Alan Bewell University of Toronto Scott Hess. William Wordsworth and the Ecology of Authorship: The Roots of Environmentalism in Nineteenth-Century Culture. Charlottesville & Lon­ don: University of Virginia Press, 2012. Pp. 290. $55. William Wordsworth and the Ecology ofAuthorship represents an important and provocative contribution to ecocritical readings of Wordsworth, of British and American Romanticism, and of the legacy ofWordsworthian versions of “nature” and authorship in modern environmentahsm. The “ecology of authorship” identified in Hess’s title refers to a “discursive system” respon­ sible for constructing “a high-aesthetic version ofnature in relation to indi­ vidual authors and, through them, also individual readers.” This “discourse of nature” allows “individual author(s) and reader(s)” to “construct their ‘true selves’ in relation to one another through seemingly autonomous imaginative activity without actually meeting in person, while at the same time identifying together as part of the new middle-class cultural model of the nation” (2). In five chapters, Hess locates Wordsworth’s “ecology of SiR, 53 (Winter 2014) 630 BOOK REVIEWS authorship” in an impressive range of particular discursive contexts: the picturesque and the emergence of photographic subjectivity; travel guides and landscape architecture; environmental protest movements; museum culture; and the gender politics of colonial travel-writing. At the conclu­ sion of each chapter, Hess reflects on how we might wrest ourselves from the limiting effects of Wordsworth’s legacy, clearing space “for new social ecologies of participation, embodiment, place and community” (19). Hess’s questioning of Wordsworth’s “ecology of authorship” is, in turn, a questioning of “Romantic ecocriticism” as it emerged in the 1990s (ex­ emplified throughout the book by Jonathan Bate’s work in Romantic Ecol­ ogy [1991] and Song ofthe Earth [2000]). Hess notes how Wordsworth’s “in­ dividualized, aesthetic appreciation of nature” (3) became the model for a cntical approach that rejected poststructuralist and New Historicist deconstructions of the environment in favor of a turning “back to a ‘nature’ supposedly set apart from social systems and practices” (4). Echoing recent critiques of this approach by Timothy Morton and Ashton Nichols, Hess traces the “historically and culturally specific meanings” of a seemingly universal version of “nature,” accessed through “silence, solitude, highaesthetic activity, and contemplation” (5). Hess argues, instead, that “an ecology that includes human beings in any meaningful way has to include space also for human economic and social activity, as well as a wide range of other human cultural practices” (5). Such an intervention is certainly valuable, although the persistent responses to “environmental criticism of the Batesian variety” (6) do at times feel like belated replies to an easy target. Chapter One shows how, despite Wordsworth’s claims to have out­ grown his early attraction...