Alyssa Wallingford
October 17, 2022
English 206
Professor Catherine Frank
Annotated Bibliography
Mariwan Hasan, and Kosar Muhamad. “Nature and Environment in William Wordsworth’s Selected Poems: An Eco-Critical Approach.” International Journal of Social and Educational Innovation, vol. 7, no. 14, Sept. 2020. EBSCOhost, https://search-ebscohost-com.une.idm.oclc.org/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsdoj&AN=edsdoj.81b232c22fff448ab756f94d70220ad1&site=eds-live&scope=site.
These authors have identified the two main connectors that are present in William Wordsworth’s writing. Through his writing, he encourages an empathetic view towards nature, really driving a discussion of humans’ connections with the environment and to reevaluate nature as a whole. The authors’ focus in this paper is using textual analysis and an ecocritical approach to explore how Wordsworth uses his own writing to advocate for the protection of the environment from destruction and how he used ecology in his writings. They use a psychoanalytic critical approach to analyze Wordsworth through his writing and both how he feels about nature and how this connects with ecocriticism. This interconnection between romanticism and ecocriticism can show that there were these ideas of ecocriticism even in the romantic period, a time in which many people resonated with their view of nature as picturesque.
Aretoulakis, Emmanouil. “Towards a PostHumanist Ecology.” European Journal of English Studies, vol. 18, no. 2, Informa UK Limited, May 2014, pp. 172–90. https://doi.org/10.1080/13825577.2014.917005.
This author approaches Wordsworth with a structuralist view in that he wants to connect Wordsworth’s ideas to the greater overarching themes of deep ecology and posthumanism in the sense of the modern idea. This article wants to focus on the misdirection of Wordsworth’s push to get people to get back to nature. The author claims that this is misguided because from an ecological view it is not at all ecological to emphasize saving nature for the sake of humanity. They use Wordsworth as an example, using writings such as his preface in Lyrical Ballads to show how views based in Romanticism are human-centered. This, the author argues, is part of a larger humanist perspective that we take towards nature as a whole that emphasizes saving nature to allow people to continue to enjoy it. But more recently, there has been the idea of deep ecology, in putting nature in the background, or otherwise allowing nature to exist for the sake of nature, not people. This view is a dramatic shift in consciousness and how deep ecology fits in with posthumanism (the idea of a non-human centered view) is important to note. This is important to the larger picture because with this new view of deep ecology, we need to start thinking about how nature has value without needing the idea of for the benefit of people. This is because not only is nature important, humans have not been around for long, and who knows where we will go in the future. So the author argues it is important to consider nature without humans at the center, because that’s how it was for most of history, but all of our views thus far have been human-oriented.
Albernaz, Joseph. “Fragmentary Domesticity: Wordsworth’s Image of the Common.” New Literary History, vol. 51 no. 3, 2020, p. 523-547. Project MUSE, https://muse-jhu-edu.une.idm.oclc.org/article/765984
This article seeks to approach this topic by analyzing specifically Wordsworth’s poem “Home at Grasmere” and how this is situated in its own period of the 1800s as well as how it shows a glimmer of the ideas of ecocriticism forming, even in this dominantly romanticist period. The author uses a mostly structuralist approach, seeking to show the influences present both from the period it was written in and how it now contributes to ecocritical thought. But there are also aspects of new criticism in that the author also focuses on tension present in the poem. In analyzing his ideas, the author also takes into consideration the experiences of Wordsworth himself. The author additionally touches on feminism in discussing what the idea of domesticity meant to Wordsworth and the others of his time, and how the public was considered male and the private female. The author argues that Wordsworth’s idea of domesticity informs his idea of the common, ultimately having an effect on his entire work.
Sehnal, Tyler M. “”In Nature There is Nothing Melancholy”: Romantic Poetry and Selfish Constructions of Nature and Sadness.” New Literaria, vol. 2, no. 1, 2021, pp. 210-216. ProQuest, https://une.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://www-proquest-com.une.idm.oclc.org/scholarly-journals/nature-there-is-nothing-melancholy-romantic/docview/2674048585/se-2.
This text features a more new criticism approach, in that all of the readings discussed in the article were analyzed by their word choice and other aspects of the words themselves, like metaphors and paradoxes. The author claims in this article that by analyzing the poems of a few different writers, they can show how these authors are speaking about nature in a way that is dismissive of its autonomy. In addition to this dismissiveness, they also use nature as a tool to express their own feelings such as melancholy. The author also seeks to compare these poets to other poets John Clare and Samuel Coleridge and review how these poems view nature, and use this to further show how Wordsworth, Charlotte Turner Smith, and other romantic writers appropriate nature to discuss and express their own sorrow. This has greater implications to how the idea of romanticism and its writings are viewed, possibly leading to a conclusion in which romanticism is more selfish and human centered than originally thought.
Ottum, Lisa. “On (Not) Hugging Trees: Affect, Emotion, and Ecology in Wordsworth’s ‘Nutting.’” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, vol. 18, no. 2, 2016, pp. 257–81. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.5325/intelitestud.18.2.0257.
This author has a focus on William Wordsworth’s controversial poem “Nutting” and whether or not it could be considered a green text. However, she argues that in comparing both this poem and another of the same name by John Clare with a similar ecocritical perspective, she hopes to redefine or otherwise reframe how we think of green texts. She also argues that these kinds of more ambiguous readings should be given their own space in green texts in order to give this subject a wider and more nuanced view. To do this, she wants to discuss these readings in terms of affect theory, which is a theory meant to explain how human emotions come together to form a story. She argues that in teaching this and other similar works, it can give students a better idea of the emotional experience of reactions to nature. She argues that it is less relevant for a student to feel the same way everyone else does about a celebrated novel than it is for them to be able to freely connect in whatever emotion they feel about the texts and concepts. This new idea of teaching could help students not only gain a better understanding of the environment in a normal curriculum, it could also allow students to be more in touch with nature, leading to overall better outcomes. In encouraging them to embrace ambiguity, it can lead to less overall frustration over reading confusing or otherwise seemingly nonsensical texts.
