During the nineteenth century, the idea of 'genius' became associated with natural landscapes on both sides of the Atlantic. Scott D. Hess explores how those associations defined the modern significance of nature and precipitated the emergence of National Parks and the environmental movement. William Wordsworth's identification with the English Lake District, Henry David Thoreau's with Walden, and John Muir's with Yosemite established the paradigm of the 'landscape of genius,' through which authors and landscapes entered the nature-writing canon and national high culture. The book also explores the significance of race, gender, and class for such landscapes, as evidenced in writings by African American author Frederick Douglass; American woman writer, Susan Fenimore Cooper; and British laboring-class poets Robert Burns, John Clare, and Ann Yearsley. Fundamentally reshaping how we understand nineteenth-century transatlantic cultures of nature, Hess reveals the ongoing legacy of the landscape of genius for environmental politics today.
Scott D. Hess explores how British and American authors' 'genius' became associated with natural landscapes during the nineteenth century, defining nature through fine arts and national high culture. His history traces the roots of a transatlantic environmental movement that was deeply shaped by social distinctions of race, class, and gender.
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'Landscapes of Genius makes the Anglo-American nineteenth century come alive through the particularities of Hess's chosen landscaped cultures, locating authors and their texts both in specific places of the distant past, and in contemporary discourse about environment. Driven by an ethical sense of a decolonised canon, this book explores how writers define places, how those places make writers, and how culture constantly remakes land and the natural world.' Simon Kövesi, Professor of English and Scottish Literature, University of Glasgow 'Written with conviction, Landscapes of Genius demonstrates that the history of author-love (especially as it manifests itself in literary landscapes and heritage tourism) is inseparable from Anglo-American environmental history. It will be impossible for future scholars to discuss responsibly the legacy of literary landscapes without also taking environmental politics and impacts into account.' Paul Westover, Professor of English, Brigham Young University
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Scott D. Hess explores how British and American authors' 'genius' became associated with natural landscapes during the nineteenth century.
Introduction;
1. Genius: author, nature, nation;
2. From Wordsworthshire
to Thoreau Country: paradigmatic landscapes of genius;
3. Landscapes of class
and gender: John Clare, Robert Burns, Ann Yearsley, and Susan Fenimore
Cooper;
4. Frederick Douglass's literary landscape and the racial
construction of nature;
5. John Muir's Yosemite and the environmental
politics of genius; Conclusion: beyond an environmentalism of genius; Coda:
Walden pond in the anthropocene and a relational approach to the humanities;
Endnotes; Bibliography; Index.
Scott D. Hess is Professor of English and Environmental Sustainability at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, where he teaches nineteenth-century transatlantic literature and cultural history and the environmental humanities. He is the author of William Wordsworth and the Ecology of Authorship: The Roots of Environmentalism in Nineteenth-Century Culture (University of Virginia Press, 2012) and Authoring the Self: Self-Representation, Authorship, and the Print Market in British Poetry from Pope through Wordsworth (Routledge, 2005). His essays have recently appeared in American Literature, Modern Language Quarterly, Studies in Romanticism, and Nineteenth-Century Literature, among other journals.
