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COPYRIGHT 2005 Boston University
Onno Oerlemans. Romanticism and the Materiality of Nature. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Pp. vii+253. $45.00 cloth/$24.95 paper.
In late August 1803, Dorothy Wordsworth, her brother William, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge climbed atop Inch-ta-vannach on Loch Lomond. Dorothy's Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland describes the view as having seemed "like a flash of images from another world," conveying a strange mixture of soothing and restless images, of images
inviting to rest, and others hurrying the fancy away into an activity still more pleasing than repose; yet, intricate and homeless, that is, without lasting abiding-place for the mind, as the prospect was, there was no perplexity.... (Journals 1: 251, 253) Onno Oerlemans's wide-ranging and illuminating literary-environmental study, Romanticism and the Materiality of Nature, enlists this journal entry as an important instance of the "dilemma of the romantic impulse to 'know' the natural world." It is a dilemma, according to Oerlemans, because the impulse ends in a feeling not of connectedness but of alienation, for the nature contemplated proves incapable of being resolved into distinct or amalgamated objects subsumable under the categories of reason (195). Like other romantic-era writers, including her two fellow travelers, Dorothy Wordsworth discovers material nature's sublimely unknowable character: "inert and inimical to consciousness, rather than open to and productive of it" (202). Physical proximity to nature reveals the observer's epistemological distance from nature.
At this textual site, as in numerous other passages, Oerlemans provocatively envisions a romantic environmentalism that is more gray than green (in Paul Fry's parlance). Where James McKusick's more recent Green Writing eschews the dichotomous view of nature as inert and of representation as isolated, Oerlemans celebrates this "shock of the material" (209), not least for its challenging of holistic conceptions of mind and nature, such as those espoused by Jonathan Bate and Karl Kroeber. Romanticism and the Materiality of Nature draws well upon the work of other environmental critics, notably Alan Bewell, Carolyn Merchant, and Patrick Murphy....
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