Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism: Toward Urbanatural Roosting [Hardcover]

Nichols chronicles the Enlightenment view of 'Nature' as static and separate from humans as it moved towards the Romantic 'nature' characterized by dynamic links among all living things. Engaging Romantic and Victorian thinkers, as well as contemporary scholarship,?he draws new conclusions about?21st-century ideas of nature.Prologue: Urbanatural Roosting SpringVernal Roosting: Romantic Ecocriticism SummerEstival Roosting: Ecocriticism FallAutumnal Roosting: Urbanature WinterHibernal Roosting: Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism Epilogue: Urbanatural Roosting

With this lyrical, insightful book on urbanature (emphasis on the first syllable), Nichols (Dickinson College) makes a significant contribution to the evolving field of eco-criticism and to the prestigious Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters series. Nichols inches toward the interdisciplinary by including architecture, natural history, cultural studies, and evolutionary biology within the purview of literary studies . . . Combining literary, anecdotal, and philosophical perspectives, this invaluable book crossbreeds political, spiritual, scientific, and aesthetic elements within the outworn dichotomy of town and country. Summing Up: Essential. - Choice

At the heart of the book is a vision, at once intellectual, spiritual, and pragmatic, of humans as fundamentally part of the natural world, together with a belief that to establish an ecoculture we must embrace that belonging. Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism s holistic vision of ecology as a single integrated system, combining the human and non-human alike, shares much in this respect with Timothy Morton s recent writings, Ecology Without Nature and The Ecological Thought. Nichols focuses, however, not so much on the problem of 'nature' as a category as on human kinship within nature: a kinship which must ultimately define our meanings, our values, and our forms of life. To 'roost' in this sense becomes a keyword for living sustails4