William Wordsworth and the Ecology of Authorship (English, Scott Hess)

Product description Review William Wordsworth and the Ecology of Authorship represents an important and provocative contribution to ecocritical readings of Wordsworth, of British and American Romanticism, and of the legacy of Wordsworthian versions of "nature" and authorship in modern environmentalism.--Studies in RomanticismScott Hess has written a valuable book that reveals the limits of Romantic ecocriticism by explaining the danger of applying contemporary standards of environmentalism to an author like Wordsworth. Hess reveals that the apparent ecocentrism of many Romantic authors is based on aesthetic and cultural standards of their own era, not on our current land-ethic or an Audubon Society activism.--Ashton Nichols, Dickinson CollegeThis book provides the most searching, historically informed assessment to date of William Wordsworth's motives and commitments as laureate, resident, guide, and defender of England's Lake Country, and in the process offers a stringent critique of the limits of Wordsworthian 'ecology of authorship' as a model for latter-day environmental(ist) imagination and practice.--Lawrence Buell, Harvard University About the Author Scott Hess, Associate Professor of English at Earlham College, is the author of Authoring the Self: Self-Representation, Authorship, and the Print Market in British Poetry from Pope through Wordsworth.