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Reframing “Harmony”: Humans as Functional Components in British Romantic Pastoral Ecosystems

Marissa W. Kopp and Suzanne E. Webster
COVID-quarantine narratives of human–nonhuman “harmony” often emphasised environmental benefits of human absence from landscapes. However, nowadays, even “in lockdown,” humans affect all Earthly ecosystems. Consequently, ecocritics frequently deem depictions of “positive human absence” unhelpful to current eco-crises, “pastoral literature” being one of their main offenders. What these respective positions discount, though, is that some ecosystems depend upon human functional roles—including the semi-natural grasslands of “ecological pastoral” systems, which can suffer a variety of problematic ecological consequences upon the withdrawal of human activity. Accordingly (we propose), truly pastoral literature frames human–nonhuman harmony in terms not of “positive human absence,” but, rather, of “positive human presence,” “negative human presence,” and “negative human absence.” Via historico-cultural explorations of poetry’s millennia-spanning ecological roles, of humans’ developing knowledge about grasslands, and of British land-management (re)arrangements circa 1750–1860, we forge an innovative ecological-pastoral interpretative lens, which we then apply to poems by Oliver Goldsmith, John Clare, and (to a lesser extent) William Wordsworth. The resulting readings show how, if viewed through an ecological-pastoral lens, the “literary pastoral” could, in fact, help tackle Anthropocenic environmental crises by (re)educating humans about their integral, rather than dominant, ecological roles on Earth.This paper contains four sections. First, the Prologue explores some reasons why pastoral poetry is often dismissed by ecocritics but embraced by disseminators of both traditional and scientific ecological knowledge. This exploration is conducted through considerations of “the pastoral,” “the georgic,” the nature of poetic expression, and poetry’s “ecological worth.” In the next section, “Ecological-Pastoral: The Theory,” we use recent research on grassland biomes and climate change to create an ecologically based interpretative lens through which to consider “the pastoral” within the context of literary works—an approach differing markedly from already-existing ecocritical techniques. Moving to the “Ecological-Pastoral in Practice,” current knowledge about grasslands and pastoral ecosystems is compared with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century knowledge; and our new interpretative lens is used to analyse several pastoral poems of 1770–1840. Finally, in the Epilogue, we introduce our “companion article,” which illustrates further how our interpretative framework can enable and encourage people to value historical literary works as relevant, useful tools in the context of tackling Earth’s current environmental emergencies.

“The Chalky Children of Evermore”: Coleridge, Keats, and the Romantic Child in PJ Harvey’s I Inside the Old Year Dying (2023)

Andrew McInnes
PJ Harvey’s I Inside the Old Year Dying adapts twelve poems from her 2022 novel-in-verse Orlam into music mixing folk horror with rock, electronica, and field recordings. Both texts delight in Dorset dialect, weaving together allusions to the Bible, Shakespeare, Coleridge, Keats, and Elvis into a Gothic tale of childhood’s end, sexual violence, and visionary experience. Coleridge’s “Answer to a Child’s Question,” describing bird song as declarations of love, bifurcates into “A Child’s Question, August,” in which Harvey turns Elvis’s “Love Me Tender” into an ornithological demand, and “A Child’s Question, July,” a stomping folk number staging a confrontation with a phallic devil figure, the Ooser Rod. Keats gives the final song its title, “A Noiseless Noise,” a plea for homecoming rendered uncertain by its haunting lyrics and crunching guitars. These Romantic poets speak to Harvey’s own interest in the natural world and the weirder realm of childhood, which spills over into supernaturalism. This article engages with recent work on rock music and Romanticism, connecting it with a parallel interest in Lacanian psychoanalysis, to explore Harvey’s representation of lack on the album as both threatening ghostly dissolution and offering pathways for creative expression.

“It lives!”: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Its Theatrical Afterlife in the Nineteenth Century

Isabelle Giles
This article explores the relationship between Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and its nineteenth-century dramatisations, particularly the most influential, Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein (1823) by Richard Brinsley Peake. By investigating how the theatrical conventions of the nineteenth-century stage came to define the novel’s wider perception, this article argues that the dramatisations may have inspired Shelley’s revisions for the 1831 edition of the text. These revisions reflect the plays’ thematic preoccupations, even now including the word presumption, which was heavily associated with Peake’s adaptation and its themes of hubris. In such a way, the continuous transformation of Frankenstein as a culture-text has helped it to remain ever present and ever relevant.

Assembling History in Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer

Gregory O’Dea
In its multiple concentric and often fragmented tales, Charles Maturin’s novel Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) explores textual forms involved in the process of assembling authentic (as opposed to feigned or fictive) history. By centering all of the tales on the Wanderer, by arranging the tales in a fractured pattern that alternates oral and written sources authored by different people, and by subverting chronological sequence in presenting the tales as they are discovered and acquired, Maturin offers a group of raw historical materials that have yet to be shaped and polished into a unified history by a single guiding hand. Melmoth the Wanderer thus strips away the polished surface of reflective history to show the underlying difficulties and differences of related primary experiences and accounts. The novel as we have it forms a kind of textual palimpsest, revealing stages and challenges of the historiographical process.

Review of Davy Notebooks Project, Editors: Sharon Ruston, Samantha Blickhan, Frank James, and Joanna Taylor

Maria Gemma Silva Ferrandez