Tag: ecology

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McGinnis — Material Agency and the “Cluttered” Environment

McGinnis, April. “Material Agency and the ‘Cluttered’ Environment in Dorothy Wordsworth’s Travel Narratives.” European Romantic Review 33.3 (2022): 411–25.

Abstract: “Recent critical studies have explored the cultural significance of walking in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, emphasizing the connection between bodily activity and creative energies: in its rhythmic, repetitive motion, walking can bring the subject into a semi-hypnotic state that invites mental wandering. This essay traces the experience of walking through Dorothy Wordsworth’s travel narratives, but I shift focus from moving unhindered through open spaces to physically navigating more challenging environments. Drawing on James J. Gibson’s theory of environmental affordances and Andrew Pickering’s concept of nonhuman agency, I consider how cluttered landscapes persistently conduct our attention to the material continuity between human traveler and nonhuman environment. My suggestion is that this heightened awareness inspires a mode of ecological thinking that alters the individual’s ethical sensibility toward the nonhuman world. This conclusion demonstrates the often overlooked value of those less accommodating natural spaces. Moreover, reading Wordsworth’s narratives with an eye toward her presentation of material agency may help us to recover a sense of Wordsworth’s own authorial agency.”

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Cervelli — Dorothy Wordsworth’s Ecology (2007)

Cervelli, Kenneth R. Dorothy Wordsworth’s Ecology. Studies in Major Literary Authors. New York: Routledge, 2007.

Contents:  Introduction — 1. Bringing It All Back Home: The Ecology of Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journals — 2. The High Road Home: Paths to Ecology in Dorothy Wordsworth’s Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland — 3. The Illuminated Earth: Dorothy Wordsworth’s Ecopoetry — 4. “More Allied to Human Life”: Dorothy Wordsworth’s Communion with the Dead — Conclusion: Trapped in the Weather of the Days: Dorothy Wordsworth in Her Environment — Notes — Bibliography — Index.

Summary (from the Routledge website): “Dorothy Wordsworth has a unique place in literary studies. Notoriously self-effacing, she assiduously eschewed publication, yet in her lifetime, her journals inspired William to write some of his best-known poems. Memorably depicting daily life in a particular environment (most famously, Grasmere), these journals have proven especially useful for readers wanting a more intimate glimpse of arguably the most important poet of the Romantic period. ¶ With the rise of women’s studies in the 1980s, however, came a shift in critical perspective. Scholars such as Margaret Homans and Susan Levin revaluated Dorothy’s work on its own terms, as well as in relation to other female writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Part of a larger shift in the academy, feminist-oriented analyses of Dorothy’s writings take their place alongside other critical approaches emerging in the 1980s and into the next decade. ¶ One such approach, ecocriticism, closely parallels Dorothy’s changing critical fortunes in the mid-to-late 1980s. Curiously, however, the major ecocritical investigations of the Romantic period all but ignore Dorothy’s work while at the same time emphasizing the relationship between ecocriticism and feminism. The present study situates Dorothy in an ongoing ecocritical dialogue through an analysis of her prose and poetry in relation to the environments that inspired it.”

Copy: Library of Congress.