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During the nineteenth century, the idea of 'genius' became associated with natural landscapes on both sides of the Atlantic. Scott D. Hess explores how those associations defined the modern significance of nature and precipitated the emergence of National Parks and the environmental movement. William Wordsworth's identification with the English Lake District, Henry David Thoreau's with Walden, and John Muir's with Yosemite established the paradigm of the 'landscape of genius,' through which authors and landscapes entered the nature-writing canon and national high culture. The book also explores the significance of race, gender, and class for such landscapes, as evidenced in writings by African American author Frederick Douglass; American woman writer Susan Fenimore Cooper; and British laboring-class poets Robert Burns, John Clare, and Ann Yearsley. Fundamentally reshaping how we understand nineteenth-century transatlantic cultures of nature, Hess reveals the ongoing legacy of the landscape of genius for environmental politics today.
List of contents
Introduction; 1. Genius: author, nature, nation; 2. From Wordsworthshire to Thoreau Country: paradigmatic landscapes of genius; 3. Landscapes of class and gender: John Clare, Robert Burns, Ann Yearsley, and Susan Fenimore Cooper; 4. Frederick Douglass's literary landscape and the racial construction of nature; 5. John Muir's Yosemite and the environmental politics of genius; Conclusion: beyond an environmentalism of genius; Coda: Walden pond in the anthropocene and a relational approach to the humanities; Endnotes; Bibliography; Index.
About the author
Scott D. Hess is Professor of English and Environmental Sustainability at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, where he teaches nineteenth-century transatlantic literature and cultural history and the environmental humanities. He is the author of William Wordsworth and the Ecology of Authorship: The Roots of Environmentalism in Nineteenth-Century Culture (University of Virginia Press, 2012) and Authoring the Self: Self-Representation, Authorship, and the Print Market in British Poetry from Pope through Wordsworth (Routledge, 2005). His essays have recently appeared in American Literature, Modern Language Quarterly, Studies in Romanticism, and Nineteenth-Century Literature, among other journals.
