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COPYRIGHT 2003 Boston University
Jonathan Bate. The Song of the Earth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Pp. xiv+335. $29.95 cloth/$18.95 paper
James C. McKusick. Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000. Pp. x+261. $55.00.
Despite the attempts of some, ecocriticism, like feminist criticism, cannot be put in a box. Debates are raging as to what counts as "true" ecocriticism. Although there has persisted, among ecocritics themselves, the survival mentality of the small group that turns ecocriticism into ecoideology, ecocriticism now has greater potential to become a contested field: the healthiest symptom both of "arrival" or legitimation and of currency. In this review I consider two recent, related and yet distinct examples of ecocriticism of romantic-period literature, by two of its most visible practitioners, Jonathan Bate and James McKusick. Given the evidence of their previous publications (Bate's Romantic Ecology, for example) and editorship of journals (this one, in Bate's case, and The Wordsworth Circle and Romantic Circles Praxis in McKusick's), these scholars are working diligently to define their field.
Green Writing delineates the allusive presence of romantic poetry, especially that of Coleridge, in the work of later American environmental writers, from Emerson to Mary Austin. The chapters on Coleridge and Thoreau are fine, exploring the ways in which they were fascinated with language, to the extent, suggests McKusick, of generating distinctive "ecolects." McKusick's close attention to linguistic detail achieves a cogent image of Thoreau as ecological thinker, more pleasant than the platitudes of Emerson to an ear attuned to empiricism, as McKusick's seems often to be. Though ostensibly it promotes romantic idealism, the introduction also explores arguments somewhere between empiricism and more radically metaphysical forms of materialism. The main body of the text, however, addresses its issues more squarely within the history of ideas, from which McKusick obtains some mileage, somewhat (though not stated as such) in the spirit of Keith Thomas' Man and the Natural World. The force of quotation builds the argument.
McKusick challenges a previous incarnation of ecocriticism by accepting that historicism is not the enemy it was claimed to be. If not by its arguments, then by the force of its objects of study, ecocriticism compels its exponents to push the envelope. Marx: "in certain writers the real production of life seems to be primeval history, while the truly historical appears to be separated from ordinary life, something superterrestrial. With this the...
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