Ecological communication and theories of the 'outside' in Romantic poetry (William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

This dissertation investigates how Romantic era writers theorize human subjectivity vis-a-vis nature in the age of modernity, Responding to the enlightenment's dialectical reduction of nature to a sphere of inert objects lacking any remainder of significance beyond the subject's cultural constructions, Romantic writers experimented with alternative models of the relationship between human beings and material ecosystems, anticipating developments in twentieth-century phenomenology, systems theory and environmental philosophy. In particular, Romantic texts are innovative in showing how nature is not “given” but discovered via discursive events and acts of embodied perception, For example, Chapter 1 examines how William Wordsworth employs the Kantian sublime in an attempt to delineate a basis for the human mind's “marriage” with nature, but also shows why this project fails insofar as it privileges the subject's transcendence over anything it encounters in the material world, resulting in texts that ironically underscore art's autonomy as a social system, Chapter 2 illustrates ways in which Percy and Mary Shelley's reformist models of subjectivity attempt to move beyond this framework by addressing the material stakes of nature's figuration in modern scientific narratives. In Chapter 3, William Blake's radically holistic account of humanity's relationship with nature is examined, particularly his exploration of animal phenomenology (world-building) as an ethical argument for biodiversity. Finally, Chapter 4 investigates how Samuel T. Coleridge's early theories of embodied cognition outline an anti-essentialist framework for understanding how the material specificity of place can influence poetic production.