A ten-week MA module in Literature and the Environment. Offered as an option for students
taking any of our MA programmes. This module is particularly relevant for students of Wild
Writing: Literature and the Environment. Literature and the Environmental Imagination: from east to west in 19th - 21st Century
Poetry and Prose. Module Convener and Lecturer/Seminar teacher: Dr Susan Oliver
The module will start by exploring poetry and prose from the nineteenth century. Beginning
with British Romantic writers William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Clare,
Percy Shelley, and Helen Maria Williams, students will learn how the natural world informed
innovative writing about the environment and the imagination. They will gain an appreciation
of nature as a contested term, analysing and evaluating uses of the pathetic fallacy and more
direct engagements with the non-human environment. Terms such as “the edge of the public
way” (Wordsworth) will be critically considered, along with some essential theories of poetry
and the imagination.
The next section will comprise works by selected American transcendentalists and other
nature writers from the mid and later nineteenth century. Students will gain a sound
understanding of changes in environmental writing across the nineteenth century. Along with
major writers such as Henry David Thoreau, we will read Margaret Fuller and New England
naturalist, John Burroughs. This part of the module will enable students to understand how
the localism of much environmental writing aimed to stimulate the imagination to think
beyond political and cultural boundaries. We will assess the ways in which, and the extent to
which, regionalism offered a site for imaginative liberty rooted in a love of the natural world. The second half of the module focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first century writing about
the environment. The aim is to provide a comparison and contrast with the materials read
during the first half of the module. Students will learn how environmental literature has
evolved since the Romantic and Victorian periods. Literary styles and techniques will be
explored and assessed, as will the differences between activism and the imagination of the
pacifist or recluse. Texts on this part of the module will typically include selected poems by
writers such as twentieth-century poets Judith Wright (Australian) and Robinson Jeffers, and
Gary Snyder; prose writing by conservationists such as Aldo Leopold and Edward Abby; and
more recent fiction by Annie E. Proulx. We will end the module with a particularly thoughtprovoking, piece of writing by a contemporary writer such as Barbara Kingsolver (Prodigal
Summer), Jeffrey Lockwood (a Wyoming academic and environmentalist, author of Prairie
Soul), or Charlotte Gill.
The module will have a clearly defined critical and conceptual framework drawn from a
recognised body of contemporary environmental/ ecocritical literature as well as recent
developments in Romantic studies. We will use anthologies of criticism, monograph studies,
and journals articles. Students will learn to resource up to date criticism, comparing it with
and evaluating it against older positions. They will be asked to consider criticism on a weekly
basis and will discuss critical works alongside each of the set literary texts. Students will be
encouraged to formulate their own ideas, based on the established critical framework. In
doing so, they will learn to locate their own arguments within the field of topical, critical
debate.
Teaching: The module will be taught through ten three-hour seminars. Students will be asked
to give short, non-assessed presentations during the course of the module.
Assessment: one essay of 5000 words
Indicative syllabus:
PART ONE: Romantic, Victorian and Transcendentalist nature writing.
Week 1:
Romanticism (1) and theories of imagination. Poetry and prose by William
Wordsworth, S. T. Coleridge, and P. B. Shelley (A Defence of Poetry).
(These will be made available on Moodle. You may like to purchase Duncan Wu's
Romanticism: an Anthology, as it includes the poems and will help to supplement your
reading.)
Week 2:
Romanticism (2). Wordsworth, A Guide to the Lakes; poems by John Clare; Helen Maria Williams, translations of Alexander Von Humboldt
(selections will be provided). Week 3:
Margaret Fuller, Summer on the Lakes, in 1843.
Week 4:
Henry David Thoreau, The Maine Woods.
Week 5:
John Burroughs, Wake-Robin and Edward Thomas, The South Country.
PART TWO: Twentieth-century environmentalism and eco-activist writing
Week 6:
Poetry and the environmental imagination. Robinson Jeffers / Gary Snyder / Judith Wright.
Week 7:
Conservationists (1) Leopold Aldo, A Sand County Almanac.
Week 8:
Conservationists (2) Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang.
Week 9:
Fiction and environmental justice: Annie Proulx, Bad Dirt (a collection of
short stories set in Wyoming, looking at the relationship between people and the
environment)
Week 10:
Environmental crisis: Charlotte Gill, Eating Dirt. (Award winning book
published this - a year in the life of Canadian tree-planter). Or, Barbara Kingsolver, Prodigal
Summer.
Aim of Module:
1. To extend students’ knowledge of the nature and impact of environmental literature
from Romanticism through to the twenty-first century. 2. To develop awareness of the work of selected poets and prose writers as they explore
the relationship between imagination and the natural world.
3. To develop a critical and evaluative understanding of the main theoretical and
methodological structures for analysing such literature.
4. To evaluate and interrogate the academic issues posed by nature writing and
ecocriticism.
5. To ensure an awareness of environmental writing by women and less well known
authors, as as well by authors prominent within the literary canon.
6. To introduce students to potential further research into related topics. Transferable/Key Skills and other attributes:
1. To develop skills in analysing, evaluating and discussing literature and literary
criticism. 2. To formulate advance research topics and projects appropriate to further study.
3. To find and use materials in databases, electronic archives and library rare books
resources in addition to using regular literary sources.
4. To develop advanced skills in presenting and discussing literary and critical materials
Indicative Critical Reading:
Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the
Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 1995
---- The Future of Environmental Criticism. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005.
Coupe, Laurence. The GreenStudies Reader: from Romanticism to Ecocritcisism
Finch, Robert, and John Elder, eds. College edition. The Norton Book of Nature Writing. New
York: Norton, 2002. Environmental History. Journal of the American Society for Environmental History. Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism (The New Critical Idiom). London: Routledge, 2004.
ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. Reno, NV: Journal of the
Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (I receive this journal).
MLA International Bibliography
Rosendale, Steven, ed. The Greening of Literary Scholarship: Literature, Theory, and the
Environment. Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2002.
Satterfield, Terre, and Scott Slovic, eds. What’s Nature Worth? Narrative Expressions of
Environmental Values. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2004.
Internet Resources:
Morton, Tim. http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/
The Association for Literature and the Environment (main website) http://www.asle.org
--- UK website http://www.asle.org.uk/home.html
The John Burroughs Association. http://research.amnh.org/burroughs/
The Walden Woods Project