The Poetics and Politics of Environmental Attunement in Transatlantic Romanticisms (1800 – 1860)

This thesis project aims to examine the types of attention that transatlantic Romantic authors constructed in their environmental writings between 1800 and 1860. It will focus on phenomenology of embodied cognition and situated sensory epistemologies of aesthetic experiences of suspension in given environments—particularly those corresponding to the categories of the picturesque and the sublime—as well as their influence on artistic creation and their ideological expressions. The corpus of this work will include: Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1818), Mary and Percy Shelley’s travelogue History of a Six Week’s Tour (1817), and William Wordsworth’s travel guide Guide to the Lakes (1835), for its British Romantic component; Margaret Fuller’s travelogue Summer on the Lakes (1844), Henry David Thoreau’s narrative essay Walden (1854), and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Blithedale Romance (1852), for its American Transcendentalist component. The methodology of the thesis will take into account issues of socioeconomic class, gender, race, political ideology, and health in the analysis of the practice of aesthetic appreciation and environmental writing. The main analytical approaches underpinning the work will be ecofeminism, environmental aesthetics, and new materialism.