Thought's Wilderness: Romanticism and the Apprehension of Nature

Author:   Greg Ellermann
Publisher:   Stanford University Press
Edition:   New edition
ISBN:  

9781503628489


Pages:   277
Publication Date:   06 September 2022
Format:   Hardback
Availability:   To order   Availability explained
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Thought's Wilderness: Romanticism and the Apprehension of Nature


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Overview

While much recent ecocriticism has questioned the value of nature as a concept, Thought's Wilderness insists that it is analytically and politically indispensable, and that romanticism shows us why. Without a concept of nature, Greg Ellermann argues, our thinking is limited to the world that capitalism has made. Defamiliarizing the tradition of romantic nature writing, Ellermann contends that the romantics tried to circumvent the domination of nature that is essential to modern capitalism. As he shows, poets and philosophers in the period such as Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Wordsworth, and Percy Shelley were highly attuned to nature's ephemeral, ungraspable forms: clouds of vapor, a trace of ruin, deep silence, and the ""world-surrounding ether."" Further, he explains how nature's vanishing-its vulnerability and its flight from apprehension-became a philosophical and political problem. In response to a nascent industrial capitalism, romantic writers developed a poetics of wilderness-a poetics that is attentive to fleeting presence and that seeks to let things be. Trying to imagine what ultimately eludes capture, the romantics recognized the complicity between conceptual and economic domination, and they saw how thought itself could become a technology for control. This insight, Ellermann proposes, motivates romantic efforts to think past capitalist instrumentality and its devastation of the world. Ultimately, this new work undertakes a fundamental rethinking of the aesthetics and politics of nature.

Full Product Details

Author:   Greg Ellermann
Publisher:   Stanford University Press
Imprint:   Stanford University Press
Edition:   New edition
ISBN:  

9781503628489


ISBN 10:   1503628485
Pages:   277
Publication Date:   06 September 2022
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   To order   Availability explained
Stock availability from the supplier is unknown. We will order it for you and ship this item to you once it is received by us.

Table of Contents

1. Romanticism and Real Abstraction 2. Kant's Remaining Time 3. Hegel in and Out of the Woods 4. Wollstonecraft in Ruins 5. Accidental Revelation in Wordsworth 6. Shelley's Ethereal Poetics

Reviews

This erudite, eloquent, and genuinely original book, with its nuanced close readings and fascinating reassessment of the reception of romanticism, makes a persuasive case for the continuing resonance of a romantic poetics of nature. -- Catherine Rigby * University of Cologne * This is a vital, eloquent, and necessary book, which scholars of romanticism and ecocriticism will be engaging for years to come. -- Jonathan Sachs * Concordia University *


This erudite, eloquent, and genuinely original book, with its nuanced close readings and fascinating reassessment of the reception of romanticism, makes a persuasive case for the continuing resonance of a romantic poetics of nature. -Catherine Rigby, University of Cologne This is a vital, eloquent, and necessary book, which scholars of romanticism and ecocriticism will be engaging for years to come. -Jonathan Sachs, Concordia University


Author Information

Greg Ellermann is Lecturer in English at Yale University.

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