British Romanticism and the Global Climate

As a result of developments in the meteorological and geological sciences, the Romantic period saw the gradual emergence of attempts to understand the climate as a dynamic global system that could potentially be affected by human activity. This chapter examines textual responses to climate disruption cause by the Laki eruption of 1783 and the Tambora eruption of 1815. During the Laki haze, writers such as Horace Walpole, Gilbert White, and William Cowper found in Milton a powerful way of understanding the entanglements of culture and climate at a time of national and global crisis. Apocalyptic discourse continued to resonate during the Tambora crisis, as is evident in eyewitness accounts of the eruption, in the utopian predictions of John Barrow and Eleanor Anne Porden, and in the grim speculations of Byron’s ‘Darkness’. Romantic writing offers a powerful analogue for thinking about climate change in the Anthropocene

From Romantic Gothic to Victorian Medievalism: 1817 and 1877

"The Cambridge History of the Gothic was conceived in 2015, when Linda Bree, then Editorial Director at Cambridge University Press, first suggested the idea to us

Selaginella parkeri

Pteridophyte

Figures of appetite and slavery from Milton to Swift

Here, employing materialist and colonial discourse theory, I contend that the reality of the "new world," so tightly bound to new appetites and new servitudes, pervasively informed literary works which have been traditionally immune to interpretations asserting their complicity with and critique of English, later British, colonialism. While scholars have always known that Milton was Secretary of Foreign Languages for an English ruler with an aggressive colonial policy, and they have identified Samuel Purchas and Peter Heylyn, churchmen turned geographers, as sources for Milton's geography, and have even argued that Satan is a colonizer, my work addresses the colonial situation at the center of Paradise Lost. Positing that England experienced "culture wars" (epistemic and ideological, as well as political and social, instability) during the period between the beheading of Charles I (1648/9) and the publication of Linnaeus' Systema Naturae (1735), in subsequent chapters I address a group of interrelated paradoxes: How was it that acquisitiveness and consumerism expanded among the middling sort who concurrently cultivated the pleasures of deferred gratification and the "paradise within"? How was it that God's Englishmen could pride themselves as defenders of "Liberty herself" while they aggressively enslaved millions? How was it that the Augustan age so concerned with decorum and taste could produce literary works so obsessed with deformity and excrement? By placing non-literary texts (travel accounts, geographies, natural histories, dictionaries, dispensatories, philosophical transactions) alongside Miltonic texts and later literary texts, we can partially account for what have been vexing interpretive problems: Raphael's astronomy, Samson's misogyny, the "coarseness" of the Restoration stage, the eighteenth-century "taste" for "monsters," Swift's scatology. We can recognize a historically specific strategy for containing the oddities and commodities issuing from the "American experience." Relying on Scripture for justification, early agents of the First Empire appropriated land and controlled bodies; relying on Science, the Second Empire sought to appropriate and control hearts and minds. This study addresses the mechanisms and literature of that shift

Selaginella kunzeana

Pteridophyte

Ipomoea purpurea

Angiosperm

Selaginella longissima

Pteridophyte