This thesis undertakes a thorough and wide-ranging appraisal of the influence of the “Little Ice Age” on British Romanticism by exploring a mixture of popular and little-explored texts written in the half-century between 1780 and 1830. It investigates how extreme cold and hostile weather resulted in sustained literary reflections on the malevolence of nature and the fragility of humans under the increasing pressures of global cooling and the paleo-climatological discovery of climate change. Much critical attention on Romanticism and representations of weather has dwelt on the literature that was generated by the gloomy and apocalyptic skies of the “Year Without a Summer”, 1816. However, I examine the influence of a broader range of meteorological phenomena across the period, such as the volcanic fallout of the eruption of the Laki Fissure, Iceland, during 1783-84 and some of the most severe winters of the century, including the one Wordsworth experienced in 1798. This thesis detects an extensive fear of polar climes and cold weather in British Romantic discourse. It investigates a broad range of materials, including William Wordsworth’s “Lucy Gray” (1800), Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden (1791), Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancyent Mariner” (1798), William Cowper’s The Task (1785), “On the Ice Islands seen Floating in the German Ocean” (1803) and “The Negro’s Complaint” (1788), Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1798), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus (1818) and The Last Man (1826). In the late-twentieth-century, Johnathan Bate explored the nuances of “Green Romanticism” as a critical approach to the relationship Romantic writers shared with the natural world. Over the past decade, scholarship has shifted to examine nature’s volatility. Previously, no unifying framework has used colour ecotheory to expose the period’s preoccupation with a raw and catastrophic natural world. Drawing on Jeffrey Cohen’s notion of Prismatic Ecology (2013), I propose a new framework to approach literature written during the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth centuries. This thesis posits the label “Gray Ecotheory”, which can help us identify and theorise a body of texts that foreground meteorological volatility and nature’s opacity and hostility as a source of fear. Gray ecotheory is a way to identify fears of cold and hostile weather as well as the threat of global cooling in Romantic writing. Gray ecotheory examines the relationship between humans and the chaos of turbulent and frightening weather patterns to reflect upon human responses to climate change and unstable Earth forces. As part of the Gray re-evaluation of the aesthetics of Edmund Burke’s “Sublime” (1757), I identify a sub-species, which I term the “Meteorological Sublime”, to clarify how literature that appears to sensationalise the dread of stormy weather could be a way of raising awareness about the looming threat of climate change. Moreover, this thesis uncovers reflections on weather in Romantic-period writing as a form of “Climate-inspired Biography”. Writers such as Wordsworth and Mary Shelley were deeply preoccupied with global cooling. They documented the “Little Ice Age” in their climate-impacted texts without fully realising it. Ultimately, the findings of this thesis reveal a prevalent discourse of cold-related fear in Romantic-period writing, which permeates a multitude of reflections on nature’s indifference to human survival and the extreme fear of global cooling. This thesis will reveal how British Romanticism provides a valuable archive of the various ways literature can be mobilised amid a climate emergency.
Date of Award | 2 Jul 2024 |
---|
Original language | English |
---|
Supervisor | Todd Borlik (Main Supervisor) & James Underwood (Co-Supervisor) |
---|