From Romantic Reverence to Ecological Responsibility: Changing Representations of Nature in British and American Literature

Abstract

One of the longest-standing and conceptually most complex topics of literature is nature. It functions as more than merely the setting of a literary work. It can be a symbol, an emotional trigger, a challenge, a cultural artifact, and a moral player. The article is a comparative one which discusses the portrayal of nature in the following literary traditions: Romantic poetry, the Transcendentalism of the American Romantics, literary Naturalism, and modern environmental writing. Wordsworth’s Nature is perceived as a healing and moralizing element which can transform loneliness into imaginative pleasure. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau extend this notion, viewing nature as a source of spiritual knowledge, of self-knowledge and of resistance to the materialist world. Naturalist writers, by contrast, frequently represent nature as impersonal and forbidding, exposing human beings to physical limitation, environmental pressure, and biological vulnerability. Literary nature in the twentieth century is more than the object of aesthetic contemplation; it is a threatened community of the kind that requires moral responsibility, as in the writings of Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson. Drawing on Raymond Williams’ work on the cultural significance of the term ‘nature’ and Cheryll Glotfelty’s work on the development of ‘ecocriticism’, the article suggests that literature in the image of nature reflects these factors in addition to being an indicator of human identity, society, progress and environmental ethics. It concludes that literature increasingly challenges the separation of humanity from the nonhuman world and calls for a movement from possession and domination towards interdependence, attentiveness, and ecological responsibility.