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COPYRIGHT 2004 Boston University
David Perkins. Romanticism and Animal Rights. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xvi+ 190. $60.00.
It is no surprise that eco-criticism has found fertile ground in the writings of the romantic period. There is now a substantial body of writing that traces the evolution of environmental consciousness to romantic-period upheavals. Even those who have seen in romanticism versions of political apostasy have done so by recognizing a "turn to nature" as somehow central, so it has seemed easy to agree that romantic writers both initiate and celebrate a sense of the natural world's intrinsic value. Indeed, many of environmentalism's contemporary political contradictions seem rooted in romantic notions of originality, individuality, escape, and wilderness. Eco-criticism is maturing rapidly, however, and in doing so it is becoming less categorical, and more historically nuanced. The point has been less to find echoes of our own ideals and more to find and understand the original contexts of reflections on the natural world.
David Perkins' new book is a significant addition to this second wave of ecologically-oriented criticism on what I take to be a centrally important but still marginalized topic. For many complicated reasons, what we...
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