Writing Environment: Cultural Phenomenology of Place in Anna Seward's Writing Process

Ecocritical scholarship reads eighteenth-century English poet Anna Seward as a successful example of proto-environmentalist rhetoric: her Coalbrookdale poems, the 1799 sonnet "To Colebrooke Dale" and 1810 blank verse poem "Colebrook Dale", address the emerging environmental effects of the Industrial Revolution in mining towns like Coalbrookdale. However, Seward was not from Coalbrookdale; the geographically oriented sense of place, which prioritizes local voices and perspectives, writes off poets like Seward as intrusive and even invasive for commenting on crises happening where they do not live or have to live with the consequences. Using Seward's Coalbrookdale poetry as a case study---not just her two poetic artifacts, but her twenty-three-year writing process---this thesis explores how cultural productions like poetry can shift the current environmentalist focus from the geographic to a sympathetic sense of place, where non-residents use artifacts to bridge spatial distance and temporal difference and relate to other locales' crisis narratives.