William Wordsworth and the Ecology of Authorship: The Roots of Environmentalism in Nineteenth-Century Culture

Scott Hess. William Wordsworth and the Ecology of Authorship: The Roots of Environmentalism in Nineteenth-Century Culture. Charlottesville & London: University of Virginia Press, 2012. Pp. 290. $55.

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 modem environmentalism. The "ecology of authorship" identified in Hess's title refers to a "discursive system" responsible for constructing "a high-aesthetic version of nature in relation to individual authors and, through them, also individual readers." This "discourse of nature" allows "individual author(s) and reader(s)" to "construct their 'true selves' in relation to one another through seemingly autonomous imaginative activity without actually meeting in person, while at the same time identifying together as part of the new middle-class cultural model of the nation" (2). In five chapters, Hess locates Wordsworth's "ecology of authorship" in an impressive range of particular discursive contexts: the picturesque and the emergence of photographic subjectivity; travel guides and landscape architecture; environmental protest movements; museum culture; and the gender politics of colonial travel-writing. At the conclusion of each chapter, Hess reflects on how we might wrest ourselves from the limiting effects of Wordsworth's legacy, clearing space "for new social ecologies of participation, embodiment, place and community" (19).

Hess's questioning of Wordsworth's "ecology of authorship" is, in turn, a questioning of "Romantic ecocriticism" as it emerged in the 1990s (exemplified throughout the book by Jonathan Bate's work in Romantic Ecology [1991] and Song of the Earth [2000]). Hess notes how Wordsworth's "individualized, aesthetic appreciation of nature" (3) became the model for a critical approach that rejected poststructuralist and New Historicist deconstructions of the environment in favor of a turning "back to a 'nature' supposedly set apart from social systems and practices" (4). Echoing recent critiques of this approach by Timothy Morton and Ashton Nichols, Hess traces the "historically and culturally specific meanings" of a seemingly universal version of "nature," accessed through "silence, solitude, highaesthetic activity, and contemplation" (5). Hess argues, instead, that "an ecology that includes human beings in any meaningful way has to include space also for human economic and social activity, as well as a wide range of other human cultural...