This book describes the emergence of ecological understanding among the English Romantic poets, arguing that this new holistic paradigm offered a conceptual and ideological basis for American environmentalism. Coleridge, Wordsworth, Blake, John Clare, and Mary Shelley all contributed to the fundamental ideas and core values of the modern environmental movement; their vital influence was openly acknowledged by Emerson, Thoreau, John Muir, and Mary Austin. By revealing hitherto unsuspected links between English and American nature writers, this book elucidates the Romantic origins of American...

This book traces the development of Coleridge's philosophy of language, situating it in the intellectual climate of his era. James C. McKusick offers the persuasive and original argument that Coleridge's linguistic theories for a coherent body of thought underlying his poetry, criticism, and aesthetics.

Romantic Ecocriticism: Origins and Legacies is unique due to its rare assemblage of essays, which has not appeared within an edited collection before. Romantic Ecocriticism is distinct because the essays in the collection develop transnational and transhistorical approaches to the proto-ecological early environmental aspects in British and American Romanticism. First, the edition s transnational approach is evident through transatlantic connections such as, but are not limited to, comparisons among the following writers: William Wordsworth, William Howitt, and Henry D. Thoreau; John Clare and...