Abstract
Hubbell shows how Byron’s poetics reflects his understanding of nature as a bioregional cultural ecology, and his aggressive dispute with Wordsworth over aesthetics encoded an epistemological debate over nature. As that contest intensified, “Wordsworth” and “Byron” became useful markers in canonical battles stretching from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries, influencing New Historicism as well as the emergence of Ecocriticism. Early ecocriticism’s investment in Heidegger, Deep Ecology, and localist dwelling also contributed to why Byron continued to be misrecognized as a poet of culture, not nature. Recognizing Byron’s “panarchist” eco-cosmopolitanism reveals the broad, contested spectrum of theory about nature during the Romantic period, which fed the equally broad array of contemporary environmental theory.
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Hubbell, J.A. (2018). Byron and Ecocriticism. In: Byron's Nature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54238-6_2
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