Meet the Module: Romantic Ecologies & the Modern Invention of Nature

Prof Vybarr Cregan-Reid (Professor of English and Environmental Humanities, School of English, University of Kent) introduces one of our exciting optional modules for Stage 1: Romantic Ecologies & the Modern Invention of Nature.
How can nature be invented? Before the Romantic era, writers such as Daniel Defoe talked of the horror, ugliness and 'unhospitable terror' of the Lake District. A hundred years later and the reputation of the region had been completely transformed into a place of beauty and contemplation. This module looks at what happened to the natural world in the century between Defoe and Wordsworth and how the debates produced during the period are ones that we are still struggling to understand the impact of today. In many ways, the legacy of Romanticism might be seen in our understanding of global warming and climate change, informed as it is by Romantic concerns that urge us not to put the natural world in a frame on the wall, or to see it as a distant thing ‘out there’. Instead, they tried to make sense of what we were risking the loss of in the crazed rush to mechanisation, technology and urban living. Throughout the module, the poetry, fiction, and essays that we will encounter (focussing on the early nineteenth century, but from other periods too) explore how the Romantics saw this newly-emergent natural world as: restorative; political, even revolutionary; the place where our bodies belong; an analogue of the mind; a reminder of who we are as a species and the threat of extinction that results in our forgetting it; and how they were cynical about it being put to use for our benefit and suspicious of how it could be profited from. This module will show that Romanticism is still with us, as are their concerns about the environment.

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So interesting! thank you.