The Transatlantic Eco-Romanticism of Gary Snyder [Hardcover]

Tracing connections between Gary Snyder and his Romantic and Transcendentalist predecessors - Wordsworth, Blake, Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau - this study explores the tension between urbanization and overindustrialization. The dialectical relationship between Snyder and his predecessors reminds readers that nature is never a simple concept.Introduction 1. The Romantic Pastoral: Snyder's Ecological Literary Inheritance 2. Snyder's Twentieth Century Eco-Romanticism 3. Romantic Aspiration, Romantic Doubt 4. Snyder's Post-Romantic Ecological Vision: The Shaman as Poet/Prophet 5. The Measured Chaos of Snyder's Eco-Poetic Form 6. Snyder's Experimentations with Post-Romantic Ecological Form 7. Mountains as Romantic Emblems of Revelation 8. Rivers as Romantic Emblems of Creation

Paige Tovey's lucid study places Gary Snyder convincingly within an Anglo-American Romantic inheritance. Alert equally to continuities and differences, she enriches our sense both of Snyder's complexities and of the extraordinary suggestiveness of the great authors who stand behind him. - Seamus Perry, Fellow of Balliol College, University of Oxford, UK

This lively but also scholarly book shows why we should think again about Gary Snyder. It productively enlarges our sense of the contexts with which his work engages, while offering impressively perceptive readings of individual poems. - Tony Sharpe, Senior Lecturer, Lancaster University, UK

Paige Tovey holds a PhD in English Literary Studies from Durham University, UK where she was the recipient of a MHRA Research Associateship (2010-2012) within the Department of English. She has published on subjects ranging from the influence of Alexander Pope on Percy Bysshe Shelley to the post-Romantic poetic form of Gary Snyder.