Shaping the Ecological Thought: Ambient Poetics in the Long Nineteenth Century

Abstract

This dissertation considers the link between long nineteenth-century literature and ecological thinking, offering ways to study our interrelation and influence with land, water, biotic life, and each other. The main authors in my study are William Wordsworth, Ebenezer Elliott, George Eliot, Gilbert White, Charles Darwin, George Perkins Marsh, John Ruskin, Richard Jefferies, William Morris, and Edward Carpenter. These mostly nineteenth-century writers developed and deployed their work in steadily ecological ways, often as tools to advance ways to reposition an ecological framework that reestablishes the self in place-based rhetoric, addressing contemporary environmental problems and new ways of living in, thinking about, and representing the natural world. My argument is that ambient poetics are a tool to navigate the ways in which literary worlds are shaped and reframed from our own worlds, providing us both with new ways to perceive our interrelatedness and offering a methodology for how we may consider our role in shaping ecological thinking for others and ourselves today. Thus, this dissertation is divided into ambient poetic types: ambient flora, land, water, fauna, and ecotopes. Ecotopes are a framework upon which biotic communities spatially exist, and ambient types comprise the novel’s flora/fauna, landform, rocks/soil. These chapters explore the connections between writers, their ambient depictions, and the movements which they represented or shaped such as railroad expansion protests, Anti-Corn Law leagues, afforestation, Millthorpe, and the Coal Smoke Abatement Society. By reading both the formation and legacy of ambient poetics in the shaping of ecological thought even today, this dissertation then seeks to trace a green language of resistance to ecological harm. More specifically, the dissertation considers the how ambient poetics demarcate ecological urgencies of the long nineteenth century, how writers complicated traditional ways of seeing the world and shaped or inspired interventional movements, and finally how these writers mobilized greater ecological thinking then and now.