BARS Blog

Kate Singer is Associate Professor of English and Chair of Critical Social Thought at Mount Holyoke College. Her wide-ranging research engages with fields including gender, philosophy, mediation, virtuality and digitality. She edits the Pedagogies section of Romantic Circles and is Secretary of the Keats-Shelley Association of America; with Ashley Cross and Suzanne L Barnett, she has recently published a new edited collection entitled Material Transgressions: Beyond Romantic Bodies, Genders, Things (Liverpool University Press, 2020). Her first monograph, Romantic Vacancy: The Poetics of Gender, Affect and Radical Speculation, which we discuss below, was published in August 2019 by SUNY Press.

1) How did you first become interested in exploring the ways that Romantic writers use vacancy?

When I was reading for my PhD comprehensive exams, I kept getting pulled toward moments in Charlotte Smith’s and Mary Robinson’s poems that seemed pretty deconstructive, particularly where very luxurious statements about sensibility were then negated via the form of the sonnet (Charlotte Smith’s voltas about tasting the Lethean cup that negates the very sensations that initiate the poetic voice), the allegory of the poem (such as sentimental Sappho’s suicidal leap into the Leucadian deep in Robinson’s Sappho and Phaon that destroys the poet and her voice), or a figural movement (such as the vanishing of the hermit at the end of Beachy Head, but not before alluding to his not-yet-written epitaph). These moments seemed oddly similar to Percy Shelley’s shadowy articulations of “vacancy” in his essay fragment “On Life” and in “Mont Blanc.” It took me a while to figure out how these moments were working as more than deconstructive or textual involutions that signaled the failures of sensibility, or its tendency to burn out into a clichéd emo numbness. But the more I felt these moments weren’t entirely empty, but often working through edgy, nebulous, or chaotic remainders of wispy language or materiality (the hinted-at hermit’s epitaph, the motion of drinking a metaphor like the Lethean cup), the more these moments seemed to offer a kind of dialectical movement, one that went further than further than negating the clichés of sensibility, but so far as fomenting new forms of affect and materiality outside the embodied emotion of sensibility. It was a lot of reading and rereading and a lot of failed attempts to talk gropingly about women’s poetry for its philosophic, poetic, and speculative dynamism.

2) As you conducted this research, what qualities came to define the poetics of vacancy you delineate?

These were figural moments in poems (and sometimes in other kinds of writing) that marked a resistance to strict forms of gendered embodiment and that attempted to raze empirical materiality via a figural movement that would then allow other forms of floating, iterative feelings (or affects) and materiality to be born. (I chose Sonia Gechtoff’s abstract expressionist painting “The Beginning” for the cover because it seemed visually to represent the material affect that came into being through figuration, which so many Romantic authors seemed to be after.) To be less abstract in terms of poetics, Mary Robinson’s sonnet sequence Sappho and Phaon moves to ironize certain forms of repetition in sonnets of sensibility, then turns to figure Sappho’s leap in to the Leucadian deep as a form of evanishment of that repetitive language tied to the feminine feeling body. Yet, the end of that poem with its oceanic depths has intimations of another figural move, an immersion, a becoming awash in a more oceanic materiality of language and embodiment that we then see at the end of “To the Poet Coleridge,” with its echoing caverns and streams and various trilling voices of humans and nonhumans ululating all around in a kind of Deleuzian or Baradian stew. It was striking to see, too, how Wordsworth and Shelley were likewise worrying over similar problems for feminine poetics in poems from “The Solitary Reaper” to “Alastor” to “Epipsychidion” and so on.

3) How did you come to select the principal subjects of your chapters (Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, Felicia Hemans, Maria Jane Jewsbury, William Wordsworth and Percy Shelley)?

When I started really reading Hemans seriously, thanks in no small part to Susan Wolfson’s Princeton edition, I realized not only how much she was taking from Percy Shelley (as Susan Wolfson and others have noted), but also how her poetry opened up some of the concerns of Charlotte Smith about the edges of the national body (a.k.a., Beachy Head) to a more global purview. Maria Jane Jewsbury was similarly working through some of Wordsworth (through her friendship with his daughter and her rereading of his work) to think about Anglo-Indian tensions. (My reading of Jewsbury was also in no small part due to becoming the technical editor of Judith Pascoe’s edition of The Oceanides while a Site Manager at Romantic Circles.) So, I began to conceptualize Smith and Robinson opening certain concerns about feminine poetics, sensibility, and the national body/landscape that then became shot through with concerns of empire and imperialism in Hemans and Jewsbury.

Then, early in my time at Mount Holyoke, I had to give a brief, entertainy lunchtime introduction to my scholarship to other colleagues across the college. I thought to use bits of Wordsworth and Shelley as pieces of Romantic-era poetry to represent that “naive Romanticism” that wasn’t hip to vacancy. I got reprimanded by a curmudgeonly older professor (in my department) for reading a line from Wordsworth’s Prelude about the brooding imagination as feminine, and I was so irritated and embarrassed that I eventually decided to write a chapter on Wordsworth and Shelley. This reinvestment in “male poets” helped me rethink the gender binarization I was actually still holding onto, vis-à-vis “women writers” and “male writers,” particularly when figures of the imagination and of thinking itself in both their works, to varying degrees, often invoke and then shirk gender binaries. Thinking about “The Solitary Reaper” one summer while I was wandering around Germany and Switzerland for NASSR and DH conferences, listening to languages and looking at different landscapes through the window of the Eurorail was pretty helpful for thinking about what’s happening in that poem as something more than the colonizing imagination, as Alan Richardson argues. The movements of the train and of languages I half knew and half created in my mind seemed an apt figure for a Wordsworthian feminist resistance to the assumption that the lass is singing a song of sensibility, or a recognizable version of women’s writing—a suspension of the presumption that we even know what she’s singing, which paradoxically opens a field of possibility, however narrow, for other voices not defined by their attachment to a sexed or gendered body but rather expressed through a nonbinary and ever-moving, ever-sung rolling landscape.

4) In your introduction, you argue that a strong investment in ‘the lens of sensibility’ has led to criticism that is ‘overwhelmingly unmindful of women poets’ play with other forms of knowledge and being’.  How might attending to the ‘serious, speculative poetics’ that your book uncovers help us rewrite our gender-inflected expectations regarding Romantic poetry, and how might this feed into the curricula we build?

I’m hoping that we can start from a place of openness to women’s and men’s poetry in new ways—that we don’t begin reading women’s writing of the period by assuming that they are writing about embodied emotion related to childrearing, domestic entanglements, or personal suffering—or when they do, they might also be writing incisively about questions of epistemology and ontology. Like many Romantic writers, women are interminably interested in how language can iteratively reflect and create structures of thought. I also believe that there is a strong sense of the nonbinary in writing from the period that we haven’t completely come to terms with. I don’t just mean nonbinary gender in terms of cross-dressing, or Blakean opposition as true friendship, or even formations of transgender in The Last Man, “The Forest Sanctuary,” or Frankenstein. I think there are other formulations that skirt either the two-sex or one-sex models, which are much more nebulous and that explore more shifting senses of gender identity and sexuality grounded in an equally shifting sense of materiality. (You can see some of this work others have done on this area in Material Transgressions: Beyond Romantic Genders, Bodies, Things (LUP 2020), and I think there’s more to do.) I had the opportunity this past year at Mount Holyoke to put together a two-semester series of courses on “The Queer Eighteenth Century” and “Nonbinary Romanticism” to help explore how notions of materiality might be quite different from the standard narrative of the shift from the one-sex to the two-sex model. This was my way of doing some extra reading on the early eighteenth century leading into a reconceptualization of the way I (try to) teach Romanticism, so that rather than, say, the idea of revolution, the idea of the nonbinary became the organizing idea. It was pretty incredible to read Olaudah Equiano, Mary Wollstonecraft, the Shelleys, and others, after reading things like Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure and Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall. Earlier eighteenth-century women’s communes offer other possibilities for non-phallic sexuality and rearrangements of gender that follow into the gothic spaces of the asylum (in Wollstonecraft’s Maria) and the ship (in Equiano’s Interesting Narrative) and the historical syncopes in Mary Shelley’s back-to-the-future stories such as “Valerius: The Reanimated Roman.”

5) What new projects are you currently working on?

I’m currently in the guts of an essay about Jane Austen and ontology, trying to understand Fanny Price in Mansfield Park as alternately a withdrawn object (in Tim Morton’s sense) and a new material actant (in Jane Bennett’s sense), as Austen’s way of thinking through questions of the human/nonhuman/inhuman via the double questions that haunt that novel, as Patricia Matthew has written—women’s ontological status as objects and moral actants and slaves’ ontologies as nonbeing, chattel, and undercommon disavowal. While we usually think of Fanny as a frustratingly static character who holds her puritanical ground against the footloose exploits of her cousins’ play-acting and Henry Crawford’s inconstancy (his “oops I did it again” moments with Maria Bertram), I think she actually does revolve through a number of ontological positions as human, inhuman, and nonhuman, and I’m interested in how and why she does—and how that articulates possibilities for ontological change. I’m also starting research on a book on shapeshifting that attempts to understand the confluence of BIPOC ontology, climate change, disability, and transgender in the Romantic period and how it speaks to the entanglements of those concerns now. It’s been a way for me to try to understand better how different pieces of Romantic-era culture conceptualize change, particularly ontological change that allows for (or causes) changes in being, to rethink questions about how we change, why, and what happens if we can’t change when we’d like to (e.g., the American political disaster). A final piece I’m looking forward to writing is on Anne Lister’s diaries and the ideas of coding—coding as a way to talk about both early computing and gender identity. Lister used mathematical symbols and Greek letters to code the very sex-in-the-suburbs queer content in her diaries, and, after reading these with my students, I’m really interested in how they might help us think about the way we code, decode, and recode gender identities—as a measure of the nonbinary nature of Romantic-era texts that has gone under the gaydar, as it were.

Professors Tim Fulford (De Montfort University) and Sharon Ruston (Lancaster University) have recently completed the gargantuan task of collecting and annotating all the surviving letters of the great Romantic-period chemist Humphry Davy. These are now available in a four-volume Oxford University Press edition that as well as the letters themselves includes an introduction, comprehensive notes, biographies of salient people and a glossary of chemical terms. Below, Tim discusses the process of producing the edition and provides a glimpse of the treasures it contains.

1) How did you come to realise that you wanted to publish an edition of Humphry Davy’s letters?

Sharon Ruston had written about the Shelleys and chemistry; I had written about Coleridge, Southey, Joseph Banks and Count Rumford. Davy had kept popping up in our research on these projects.  Then Sharon was contacted by the literary executor of June Z. Fullmer, a US historian of chemistry who had begun an edition of Davy’s correspondence but had been prevented by illness from completing it.  He made over the papers to Sharon and we decided that completing the project was viable.  We did not know then that we would find hundreds of manuscript letters unknown to Fullmer, more than doubling the size of the task.

2) How did you go about locating the correspondence the edition includes?

Locating correspondence is obviously crucial.  The bread-and-butter way to find MS letters is by searching the catalogues of archives and by emailing archives whose catalogues are not online. We were able to win grants for research assistance to get help with this.  Our superb Research Associate, Andrew Lacey, handled a large correspondence with archives all over Europe and America. Then there is the way of expert advice, which sometimes leads to unexpected contacts: we had help from Frank A. J. L. James, editor of Michael Faraday’s Correspondence.  He pointed us to several private collectors, including Herb Obodda, a veteran mineral collector and trader. I found Obodda’s address via an old magazine that featured a photo of him taken during a collecting expedition on the Pakistan border in the 1970s — in Afghan dress, toting an AK47, and accompanied by three Mujahideen.  Enquiring of the magazine editors, it became clear that Obodda was a legendary figure.  They gave me several email addresses for him — but I got no reply for nearly a year, when out of the blue, he sent scans of the letters he owned, having emerged from a stay in hospital.

3) What were the most challenging aspects of constructing the editorial apparatus you designed to explain and contextualise the letters?

Creating a large edition involves controlling huge masses of information.  Knowing that most researchers consult correspondence editions in search of information, rather than reading them cover to cover, we wanted the apparatus to allow readers to find things easily but without our having to repeat ourselves.  How often should our footnoting explain particular experiments, or detail obscure people, when they were mentioned in different letters months or years apart?  Simply doing so once and then using the index to cross-reference further mentions would be cumbersome for readers, forcing them to move back and forth across the volumes.  Repeating the same information many times risked redundancy, but at least offered readers instant same-page explanations.  In the end, we decided to err on the side of repetition, agreeing that it was better to risk having too much rather than too little explanation. To reduce redundancy, we put into small capitals the names of people for whom we had created entries in an alphabetically-organised list of mini-biographies. By this means, readers can see at a glance when further information on a person is available.

4) Are there particular letters you discovered as part of the project that you think deserve especial attention, either for the important new light they shed or for their intrinsic interest as compositions?

Davy’s letters are fascinating for many things, so it’s hard to answer this briefly other than to say, order the edition for your library and read it!  A letter that will especially interest students of Romanticism however is one of October 1800 in which Davy describes a visit to Tintern Abbey, evidently made in the wake of his reading Wordsworth’s poem (he was seeing the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads through the press at the time).  In it, he looks to investigate whether Wordsworth’s description of being laid asleep in body and becoming a living soul has a physiological and chemical cause, rather than being simply metaphorical. He also announces his new experiments on matter with the Voltaic pile.  Here’s a part-transcript with our annotations:

28. Humphry Davy to Davies Giddy, 20 October [1800] Pneumatic Instn; Hotwells. Octr 20.

Be assured my respected friend that your last letter[1] though short was highly gratifying to me; it could not indeed have communicated to me more pleasing intelligence than that of the perfect restoration of your health.—At the moment it was brought to me I was about to depart with King[2] & Danvers[3] on an excursion to the banks of the Wye. Our design was to see Tintern Abbey by moonlight; and it was perfectly accom­plished.[4] After viewing for three hours all the varieties of light & shade which a bright full moon & a blue sky could exibit in this magnificent ruin;[5] and wandering for three days among the colored woods & rocks sur­rounding the river between Monmouth & Chepstow we arrived on the fourth day at Bristol having undergone (to balance against the pleasures of the tour) the fatigues of a stormy voyage down the Wye, across the mouth of the Severn & up the Avon.— On analysing after our return the air collected from Monmouth, from the woods on the banks of the Wye, & 〈from〉 the mouth of the Severn, there was no perceptible difference. They were all of similar composition to the air in the middle of Bristol. ie they contained about 22 pr cent oxy­gene—The air from the bladders of some sea weed apparently just cast on shore at the old passage likewise gave 22.—Comparing the expts made by Cavendish nearly 20 years ago at London & Kensinton[6] & the expts of Berthollet at Paris & [xxxx] in Egypt[7] with those I have made within the last month at different temperatures, in different weather & with dif­ferent winds, I am almost convinced that the whole of the lower stratum of the atmosphere is of uniform composition—The air that I took from the mouth of the Severn must have passed over much of the atlantic as the wind had blown nearly due west for more than a week before.[8]—

No test can be more fallacious & imperfect than Nitrous gas[9] on account of the different composition of the Nitrous acid formed in the different manipulations of eudiometrical expts[10] The high overating of the oxygene of the atmosphere at 27 & 28 Prcent is owing to the almost general use of the nitrous test.—The Eudiometer[11] that I have lately used is a very sim­ple & commodious one—It consists of a tube about 5 inches long contain­ing 200 grains of water—The space between the 140 & 180 grains is graduated.—This tube is emptied of water in an atmosphere when you wish to know its composition & plunged into a solution of muriate or sulphate of iron[12] impregnated with Nitrous gas—The oxygene is absorbed in a few minutes & the residuum gives (without correction) the Nitrogene.[13]— In pursuing expts on galvanism during the last two months I have met with unexpected & unhoped for success. Some of the new facts on this subject promise to become instruments capable of destroying the mysteri­ous veil which Nature has thrown over the operations & properties of etherial fluids— Galvanism I have found by numerous expts is a process purely chemical & it depends wholly on the oxydation of metallic surfaces having different degrees of electric conducting power.[14]—[. . .] But I must stop without being able to expatiate on the connection which now is obvious between galvanism & some of phaenomena of organic motions. I never consider this subject without having forcibly impressed on my imagination your observations on the science of etherial fluids & I cannot help flattering myself that this age will see your predictions accom­plished.[15 [18 in original]]— I remain with sincere respect & affection yours H. Davy 

1. Not traced.
2. John King [Nicholas Johann Koenig] (1766–1846), a Bristol­ based surgeon who succeeded Davy in his role at the Medical Pneumatic Institution in 1801.
3. Charles Danvers (c.1764–1814), a Bristol wine merchant, trading in partnership under the name Danvers and White.
4. On this expedition to see Tintern at night Davy was following, with two of Southey’s friends, in the footsteps of a picturesque tour made by Southey, Coleridge, and Joseph Cottle in 1795. Davy was also in 1800 preparing for the press the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, a collection in which the most prominent poem was Wordsworth’s ‘Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour’.
5. Full moon fell on 2 October 1800, suggesting the likely date of the expedition. Davy wrote a reverie partly based on this experience in his notebook; it is quoted in Memoirs, i, pp. 117–19.
6. Henry Cavendish (1731–1810) published in 1783 and 1784 descriptions of experi­ments he had made to measure the composition of the atmosphere (eudiometry): ‘An Account of a New Eudiometer’, PTRS [Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society], lxxiii (1783), 106, and ‘Experiments on Air’, PTRS, lxxiv (1784), 119–53.
7. Berthollet participated in Napoleon’s expedition in 1798–1800 to Egypt, where he conducted a series of eudiometric observations on the composition of the atmosphere. These and similar experiments made in Paris were reported in the Annales de chimie, xxxiv (1800), 73, and translated in A Journal of Natural Philosophy, Chemistry, and the Arts, iv (April 1800– March 1801), 214–19. Berthollet argued that the proportions of gases composing the air varied little in different places. It seems Davy, having just read Berthollet’s paper, was repeat­ing his experiments while on the Wye. On eudiometry, see Simon Schaffer, ‘Measuring Virtue: Eudiometry, Enlightenment, and Pneumatic Science’, in The Medical Enlightenment of the Eighteenth Century, eds Andrew Cunningham and Roger French (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 281–318.
8. Davy re­used this discussion of Cavendish and the Atlantic­-borne air in ‘An Account of a New Eudiometer’, Journal of the Royal Institution, i (1802), 45–8 (p. 48) (CWHD [Collected Works of Sir Humphry Davy], ii, pp. 228–32 (p. 231)).
9. More commonly known as nitrous oxide (N2O).
10. As part of his work on nitrous oxide, Davy devised experiments which showed that nitrous gas is entirely dissolved in green iron sulphate, but when air is also present the nitrous gas becomes nitrous acid. (He published these in Researches, pp. 152–79 (CWHD, iii, pp. 92–108)). His eudiometry benefitted from these experiments in that the amount of nitrous gas generated in a eudiometric test was more accurately estimated when dissolved in Davy’s way, in green iron sulphate, than when shaken in air over water, the typical practice.
11. This then-­new instrument, invented by Marsilio Landriani (1751–1815) and developed by Volta, was made famous by Horace ­Bénédict de Saussure (1740–99) who in 1788 used one to measure the composition of the air on an Alpine col. In 1802, Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) carried one almost to the top of Mount Chimborazo in the Andes to measure the composition of the air at still more elevated heights.
12. Now known as ferric chloride (FeCl3); ferric sulphate (Fe2(SO4)3).
13. Davy published the results of his experiments on the composition of air at different locations in ‘An Account of a New Eudiometer’, Journal of the Royal Institution, i (1802), 45–8 (CWHD, ii, pp. 228–32).
14. When the pile was first constructed, it was not clear whether the electricity it produced was the same as the static electricity typically collected in Leyden jars, or whether it gener­ated what Galvani claimed was the different electricity found in animals.Volta argued that the pile worked like an electrifying animal—the torpedo fish—but produced the same kind of electricity as static electricity (‘common electricity’). The pile showed that animal electricity was not necessarily different in kind from common electricity. Having repeated the experiments of Volta, Davy here differs from him concerning the mode of its action: rather than pursue the analogy to the torpedo, he offers a chemical explanation, as William Nicholson had already done, for its generation of electric current. On Davy’s early work on the pile, see G. Pancaldi, ‘On Hybrid Objects and Their Trajectories: Beddoes, Davy and the Battery’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, lxiii (2009), 247–62.
15. While still a youth in Penzance, Davy, encouraged in scientific pursuits by Giddy, had devised an experiment intended to disprove the Lavoisierian theory that heat was an etherial fluid—caloric. His publication ‘An Essay on Heat, Light, and the Combinations of Light’ (Contributions to Physical and Medical Knowledge, pp. 5–147) (CWHD, ii, pp. 3–86) was based, in part, on a refined version of the experiment, but was criticized by Giddy for specu­lating too boldly.

5) What new projects are you currently working on?

Sharon is leading a project to transcribe and put online Davy’s notebooks.  She also has coming out, with the Bodleian Library Press, The Science of Life and Death in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (2021).  I am editing, with Dahlia Porter, the letters of Davy’s mentor Thomas Beddoes, for Cambridge University Press.  I have also edited a special issue of European Romantic Review on Robert Bloomfield and John Clare, out later in 2021. My scholarly edition of Robert Southey’s Life of Nelson will be published by Routledge in 2021; I will follow that with an edition of his Life of Wesley in 2022.

Kate Rigby is Professor of Environmental Humanities at Bath Spa University, where she is the the founding Director of the Research Centre for Environmental Humanities. Her work as a scholar and organiser has played a pioneering role in developing the international, interdisciplinary field of Environmental Humanities. Her own work focuses particularly on the Romantic period and its ongoing legacies, and she has published extensively on German and British philosophies of nature; the poetics of place; ecophilosophy and ecotheology; ecological feminist, new materialist and postcolonial thought; and multispecies studies and disaster studies. Her most recent monograph, Reclaiming Romanticism: Towards an Ecopoetics of Decolonisation, which we discuss below, was published by Bloomsbury in May 2020.

1) How did you first become interested in the ecological potential of Romantic writing?

I think I would have to say that the seeds for this interest were sown a very long time ago: probably when I was 15, an Aussie kid living south of Oxford (where my father was on sabbatical), and somebody lent me a bike right around the time my mother gave me a little hardback copy of The Selected Poems of William Wordsworth in the World’s Classics Series. Reading Wordsworth and riding around the Cotswolds got interlocked, and I found myself becoming enraptured by both. I recalled this many years later when I heard Geoffrey Hartman say that he fell in love simultaneously and inextricably with Wordsworth’s verse and the English countryside after his family found refuge in Britain from Nazi Germany. My teenage sojourn in Oxfordshire was under far happier circumstances, but I was beginning to share the growing environmental concerns of the 1970s, so my appreciation of what still looked like England’s ‘green and pleasant’ land, along with Wordsworth’s Lake District, was already tinged with an awareness of precarity.

My first academic encounter with Romanticism was in German Studies at the University of Melbourne, where I wrote an MA thesis on Heinrich von Kleist. By the time I embarked on my doctorate in German and Comparative Literature at Monash University in the late 1980s, I was passionately involved with ecological thought and activism, and found in Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s critique of the ‘dialectic of enlightenment’ (one that is itself profoundly indebted to Romanticism) – reworked though a feminist and postcolonial lens –  an apt theoretical framework for my ecofeminist reading of tragedy and enlightenment in German drama of the Goethezeit. What I still did not know at the time I published my dissertation Transgressions of the Feminine: Tragedy, Enlightenment and the Figure of Woman in Classical German Drama in 1996 was that others too were avidly at work bringing an ecological perspective to bear in literary studies, and that this initiative had even been given a name: ecocriticism! I had already begun work on my next Romanticism project when I enthusiastically attended my first ecocritical conference in 1998 (at Bath Spa, as it happens, where I am now Professor of Environmental Humanities). Needless to say, my next monograph, Topographies of the Sacred: The Poetics of Place in European Romanticism (2004) which branches out to British as well as German Romanticism, was written in close conversation with other ecocritical Romanticists, and appeared in the University Press of Virginia’s Under the Sign of Nature series (of which I am now a co-editor).

2) How did you come to develop the decolonial lens through which your book re-evaluates Romanticism?

Like all too many white Australians of my age, I really only began to confront the carnage of colonisation on the continent that I call home as an adult. Growing up in the nation’s capital, I didn’t even know that the city’s name had been stolen, along with their land, from the First Nations for whom this area had long been a meeting place (Ngambri was transliterated into ‘Camberry’ and appropriated as the name for one of the earliest pastoral stations on what the invaders dubbed the Limestone Plains). My awakening was facilitated by my studies, in that Melbourne University was a hotbed of theory in the 1980s, including postcolonial variants: Dipesh Chakrabarty was an older contemporary of mine there, and one of our most memorable visiting lecturers was Gayatri Spivak, who delivered an early version of ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ to an intrigued audience.

In Transgressions of the Feminine, as well as in my subsequent co-authored book on German feminist theory, Out of the Shadows (1996), I engaged most closely with work that brings postcolonial theory into conversation with critical ecofeminism (notably that of Val Plumwood, Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva). However, it was only towards the end of writing Topographies of the Sacred that I realised that there was an unsettling undercurrent to my interest is questions of place and displacement in European Romanticism: namely the colonial dispossession, coupled with ecological degradation, of which I was myself a beneficiary in Australia. I therefore embarked on researching a decolonial deep history of the Canberra region, nourished and encouraged by my conversations with the historians, philosophers, geographers and ethnographers of the Australian Working Group for the Ecological Humanities (formed the late 1990s, as recounted in my article ‘Weaving the Environmental Humanities: Australian strands, configurations, and provocations’ in Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, 23.1). This research ended up morphing into a consideration of how unprepared settler Australians were for the catastrophic environmental and climatic changes, to which their economy and lifestyle was a major contributor, and which were beginning to show up in the increasing frequency and intensity of those extreme weather events that they were still misleadingly calling ‘natural disasters’. The resultant monograph, Dancing with Disaster: Environmental Histories, Narratives and Ethics for Perilous Times (2015) weds my longstanding ecocritical interests in Romanticism with my more recent engagement with Australian history, literature and ‘ethics for decolonisation’ (Deborah Bird Rose, Reports from a Wild Country, 2004). Beginning with a short story by Kleist that responds in his characteristically quizzical way to the debates that erupted in the wake of the Lisbon Earthquake, this book concludes with Waanyi author Alexis Wright’s novel Carpentaria and its subversion of the modern Western category of ‘natural disaster’ through a poetics of decolonisation. Reclaiming Romanticism brings this perspective to bear on Romantic and post-Romantics ecopoetics, but with a wider historical reach, extending to North America as well as Australia, on the track of varied European Romantic legacies and their transformations.

3) Most of your chapters pair canonical Romantic authors with more contemporary poets, often writers with backgrounds informed by capitalist appropriation of land, lives and resources (so William Wordsworth is paired with Tim Lilburn; Percy Shelley with Kevin Hart; John Clare with Audre Lorde and Natasha Trethewey; and William Blake with Judith Wright and Jordie Albiston).  How did you decide to construct chapters around such pairings, and how did you select the particular combinations?

I have always been interested in considering Romanticism not only as a historical period, but also as a continuing strand in Western culture. In Topographies of the Sacred, I highlight Romanticism’s ambivalent historical legacies. In my new book, though, I felt called to push back against what I consider to be reductive critiques of Romanticism, which often fail to adequately acknowledge how European Romanticism (itself an heterogeneous phenomenon) differs from North American and other settler colonial Romanticisms, such as Australian. What I am doing here, then, is seeking to ‘reclaim’ a number of ecopoetic arts of resistance to the ‘logic of colonisation’ (as framed by Val Plumwood) in specific works of English Romantic verse, and to show how variants of these Romantic ecopoetics might be traced in modern and contemporary poetry from North America and Australia.

I should stress that the connections I establish are not based on any arguments concerning ‘influence’ or ‘reception’ but arise from within my own hermeneutic horizon. They are intended to demonstrate how the ‘contemplative’, ‘affective’, ‘creaturely’ and ‘prophetic’ poetics inaugurated within European Romanticism continue to resonate in ecopolitically salient ways in North American and Australian literature. At the same time, as I argue in the final chapter, there are ways in which Romantic ecopoetics itself demands to be decolonised. Here, my attention turns to what John Kinsella terms the ‘pastoral imposition’ (both on the land and in the mind) in Australian history and literature, and I conclude with a contemporary pairing of Anne Elvey and Jeanine Leane in order to consider what a decolonial ecopoetics might look like from either side of the Indigenous/non-Indigenous divide, and what prospects there might be for a meeting (if not, necessarily, a merger).

4) Why do you think Romanticism can provide particularly powerful affordances for grappling with our present, over and above other constellations of thoughts, artists and artworks?

As indicated above, Romanticism is a mixed bag: not all of it is helpful by any means, and other constellations of thought, artists and artworks might also provide affordances for grappling with current challenges. However, the European Romantics were the first to bear witness to that process of fossil-fuelled industrialisation that has since delivered the world into the problematically named ‘Anthropocene’, and many did so with extraordinary insight into its underpinnings and implications, along with creative proposals for how the instrumental and anthroparchal rationality of expansionist industrial-capitalist modernity might be countered. In particular, I want to revalue the ethos of multispecies conviviality and sympoiesis (a term coined by Friedrich Schlegel) that I discern in European Romanticism, over and against the wilderness ethic, premised on nature-culture dualism and complicit with the suppression of Indigenous modes of dwelling, which later came to the fore in North America.  As I argue, however, if this promise is to be made good, it needs to be translated into ecopolitical praxis. For that reason, each chapter also incorporates examples of contemporary ecopoetics ‘beyond the page.’

5) What new projects are you currently working on?

Next year, I want to pick up on one of the threads in Reclaiming Romanticism for a book edited by Clare Colebrook on ‘Romanticism at the End of the World’. The chapter will explore further the lineaments of what I call (with a nod to Anna Seward’s ‘Colebrook Dale’) the ‘Ploutocene’, in relation to loss of the commons, as seen by John Clare in Helpston, and Jeanine Leane on the lands of her Wiradjuri forbears in New South Wales. My main project at present, though, departs from Romanticism to engage more closely with those Christian texts and traditions that also appear periodically in Reclaiming Romanticism. Specifically, I am researching and revisioning a neglected genre of Christian literature, the ‘Hexameron’, that is, meditations on the biblical six days of creation, a genre inaugurated by the exuberantly critter-loving, Earth-honouring Basil of Caesarea in the 4^th century. I am planning to write my own (post-Darwinian, post-dogmatic) hexameron in the horizon of anthropogenic mass extinction and ecological unravelling: an Hexameron for the Ploutocene, pitched towards the (re)constitution of practices of multispecies care, conviviality and co-creativity, offering pathways through (and potentially beyond) the current ecocidal era of de-creation.