Political ecologies: The contingency of nature in American romantic thought

"Political Ecologies: The Contingency of Nature in American Romantic Thought" articulates a turn to materialist thought in the writing of Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, and Walt Whitman, tracing the emergence of a materialist alternative to the ahistorical and idealized account of nature conventionally associated with romantic thought.;Widely considered the wellspring of the modern environmental imaginary, the romantic movement has been championed by literary ecocritics for its valorization of intuition over empirical methods of knowledge. On this view, romantic intuition is a peculiarly inspired mode of perception (typified by Emerson's "transparent eye-ball" or Shelley's "all-penetrating gaze") by which we are able to access the essence and intrinsic virtue of natural order---dimensions which escape the reductive and instrumentalizing vision of nature attributed to scientific empiricism. This view thus treats both nature and intuition as common denominators of an otherwise diverse population, representing respectively a shared reality and the universal faculty by which we may know it. However I argue that this received narrative of romantic ecological thought has obscured the ways in which dissent from this consensus view forms the crux of work by canonical authors of the American romantic period. As I demonstrate, far from renouncing science for a universal intuitionism, Thoreau, Douglass, and Whitman draw upon mid-century biological discourses to produce accounts of intuition which relinquish its disembodied and universalizing function, exploring instead the possibility that intuitive perception yields insights as divergent as the bodies and brains from which they spring. These efforts to theorize biological difference in turn allow the four authors I treat to imagine a natural order that is not ineluctably harnessed to moral truth, and thus I argue that their texts develop a materialist romanticism which substantially dismantles the reified and morally idealized account of "Nature" currently cited as definitional of romantic texts. In the alternative view that emerges, a view I term "political ecology," Thoreau, Douglass, Whitman attempt to re-conceive of nature as a material system at once generative of, and shaped by, the contingencies of human history.