(Re-)Imagining Nature, Gender, and Sexuality in American Romanticism and Beyond

Luisa Turczynski

(Re-)Imagining Nature, Gender, and Sexuality in American Romanticism and Beyond

ISBN 978-3-98940-043-6, 226 S., kt., € 30,00 (2024)

(Anglistik – Amerikanistik – Anglophonie, Bd. 30)

This study is concerned with the continuity between the Romantic conception of nature and contemporary Euro-American environmental discourses and literary practices. More specifically, it examines how conceptual and representational paradigms of the Romantic self-nature relationship have modeled ecocritical and ecofeminist thinking as well as nature-related writing by female Anglophone authors of the last three decades.

At first glance, the research interest in Romantic legacies within the collective environmental imagination might seem outdated, for it has shaped the fields of ecocriticism and ecofeminism since their institutionalization. However, these fields typically operate with a binary distinction between Romantic, anthropo- and androcentric modes of nature writing and feminine-coded, relational, and eco-centric rewritings that flowered at the turn of the twentieth century. Arguing that this gender-specific differentiation diminishes the complexity of Romantic writing and undermines a cornerstone of ecofeminist theory, this study revisits the polarized literary traditions from a model-theoretical view.

After providing a cultural-historical outline of the transatlantic formation and colonialist utilization of the Romantic nature philosophy and aesthetics, this book systematizes ecocritical and ecofeminist readings into a model of the Romantic self-nature relation. Finally, analyses of three contemporary quest narratives of female and queer emancipation explore the continuity and subversive variation of the modeled paradigms in transnational contexts, probing their connectivity with ecological and feminist thought.

Buchvorschau / Inhaltsverzeichnis (pdf)