John Rignall - Ecology and the Literature of the British Left: The Red and the Green

ECOLOGY AND THE LITERATURE OF THE BRITISH LEFT

Premised on the belief that a social and an ecological agenda are compatible, this collection offers readings in the ecology of left and radical writing from the Romantic period to the present. While early ecocriticism tended to elide the bitter divisions within and between societies, recent practitioners of ecofeminism, environmental justice, and social ecology have argued that the social, the economic and the environmental have to be seen as part of the same process. Taking up this challenge, the contributors trace the origins of an environmental sensibility and of the modern left to their roots in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, charting the ways in which the literary imagination responds to the political, industrial and agrarian revolutions. Topics include Samuel Taylor Coleridges credentials as a green writer, the interaction between John Ruskins religious and political ideas and his changing view of nature, William Morris and the Garden City movement, H. G. Wells and the Fabians, the devastated landscapes in the poetry and fiction of the First World War, and the leftist pastoral poetry of the 1930s. In historicizing and connecting environmentally sensitive literature with socialist thought, these essays explore the interactive vision of nature and society in the work of writers ranging from William Wordsworth and John Clare to John Berger and John Burnside.

The Red and the Green

Edited by

JOHN RIGNALL
University of Warwick, UK

and

H. GUSTAV KLAUS
University of Rostock, Germany

with
VALENTINE CUNNINGHAM
University of Oxford, UK

First published 2012 by Ashgate Publishing

Published 2016 by Routledge
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Copyright The editors and contributors 2012

John Rignall and H. Gustav Klaus have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Ecology and the literature of the British left: the red and the green.

1. English literature History and criticism. 2. Ecology in literature. 3. Right and left (Political science) in literature. 4. Radicalism in literature. 5. Politics and literatureGreat BritainHistory. I. Rignall, John, 1942 II. Klaus, H. Gustav, 1944 III. Cunningham, Valentine.

820.936-dc23

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ecology and the literature of the British Left : the red and the green / edited by John Rignall and H. Gustav Klaus and Valentine Cunningham.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4094-1822-1 (hardcover: alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-3155-7867-5 (ebook)

1. English literature19th centuryHistory and criticism. 2. Radicalism in literature. 3. English literature20th centuryHistory and criticism. 4. Ecology in literature. 5. Politics and literatureGreat BritainHistory. 6. RadicalismGreat Britain History. 7. RomanticismEngland. I. Rignall, John, 1942 II. Klaus, H. Gustav, 1944III. Cunningham, Valentine.

PR468.R33E26 2012

820.9355dc23

2012003109

ISBN 9781409418221 (hbk)
ISBN 9781315578675 (ebk-PDF)
ISBN 9781317146315 (ebk-ePUB)

H. Gustav Klaus and John Rignall

Richard Kerridge

Seamus Perry

Helena Kelly

Mina Gorji

Simon Kvesi

Stephen Harrison

John Rignall

Dinah Birch

Anna Vaninskaya

John Sloan

William Greenslade

H. Gustav Klaus

Valentine Cunningham

James Radcliffe

Christian Schmitt-Kilb

Graeme Macdonald

Dinah Birch is Professor of English Literature at Liverpool University. She has published widely on nineteenth-century literature, and has edited novels by Anthony Trollope, Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot. Her books include Ruskins Myths (1988), Ruskin on Turner (1990) and Our Victorian Education (2007). She is the general editor of the seventh edition of the Oxford Companion to English Literature (2009) and reviews regularly for the Times Literary Supplement and London Review of Books.

Valentine Cunningham is Professor of English Literature at Oxford and Fellow and Tutor in English at Corpus Christi College. His many publications include British Writers of the Thirties (1988), In the Reading Gaol: Postmodernity, Texts, and History (1994), and Reading after Theory (2002).

Mina Gorji is a University Lecturer in Romantic Literature at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Pembroke College. Her published works include a monograph on John Clare, John Clare and the Place of Poetry (2008), an edited collection on rudeness in modern British culture, Rude Britannia (2006), and essays on literary allusion, the poetics of mess and William Hones Everyday Book.

William Greenslade is Professor of English at the University of the West of England. His research focuses on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British literature and culture. His publications include Degeneration, Culture and the Novel 18801940 (1994) and, as editor, Thomas Hardys Facts Notebook: A Critical Edition (2004), and contributions to Keith Wilson (ed.), A Companion to Thomas Hardy (2009); Patrick Parrinder and Andrzej Gsiorek (eds), The Oxford History of the Novel in English, Vol. 4: The Reinvention of the British and Irish Novel 18801940 (2010); and Gail Marshall (ed.), Shakespeare and the Nineteenth Century (2011).

Stephen Harrison is Professor of Latin Literature at the University of Oxford and Fellow and Tutor in Classics at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He has published widely on Latin literature, and has also written on the modern reception of Virgil, Horace, the ancient novel and ancient epic.

Helena Kelly completed her D.Phil at the University of Oxford in 2009 with a thesis on literary responses to the enclosures around the turn of the nineteenth century. A former law student, she has published in Notes and Queries and Persuasions and is currently engaged in editing Elizabeth Herveys 1796 novel The History of Ned Evans for the Chawton House Library Series.

Richard Kerridge lectures in English Literature and Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, where he leads the MA in Creative Writing and co-ordinates research in the School of Humanities and Cultural Industries. He was one of the first teachers of ecocriticism in Britain, and co-edited