Book Description

The Literary Heritage of the Environmental Justice Movement showcases environmental literature from writers who fought for women’s rights, native rights, workers’ power, and the abolition of slavery during the Romantic Era. Many Romantic texts take flight from society and enact solitary white male encounters with a feminine nature. However, the symbolic landscapes of Romanticism were often radicalized by writers like Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, William Apess, George Copway, Mary Wollstonecraft, Lydia Maria Child, John Clare, and Henry Thoreau. These authors showed how the oppression of human beings and the exploitation of nature are the twin driving forces of capitalism and colonialism. In addition to spotlighting new kinds of environmental literature, this book also reinterprets familiar texts by figures like William Blake, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mary Shelley, William Wordsworth, and Walt Whitman, and it shows how these household figures were writing in conversation with their radical contemporaries.