Byron's Nature

This book is a thorough, eco-critical re-evaluation of Lord Byron (1789-1824), claiming him as one of the most important ecological poets in the British Romantic tradition. Using political ecology, post-humanist theory, new materialism, and ecological science, the book shows that Byron’s major poems—Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, the metaphysical dramas, and Don Juan—are deeply engaged with developing a cultural ecology that could account for the co-creative synergies in human and natural systems, and ground an emancipatory ecopolitics and ecopoetics scaled to address globalized human threats to socio-environmental thriving in the post-Waterloo era. In counterpointing Byron’s eco-cosmopolitanism to the localist dwelling praxis advocated by Romantic Lake poets, Byron’s Nature seeks to enlarge our understanding of the extraordinary range, depth, and importance of Romanticism’s inquiry into the meaning of nature and our ethical relation to it.

“Byron’s Nature undertakes a thorough-going ecocritical re-evaluation of Byron, both as a Romantic poet and as an ecological thinker. Bringing together several strands of contemporary eco-theory, including post-Heideggerian understandings of ‘dwelling’, Murray Bookchin’s anarcho-syndicalist ‘social ecology’, Gunderson's and Holling’s systems theoretical ‘panarchy’, and new materialist onto-epistemologies and ethics of human-nonhuman entanglement, Hubbell enlarges our understanding of British ‘Romantic ecology’ to encompass a cosmopolitan model of emancipatory ecopolitics and ecopoetics that was historically novel, as well as highly pertinent to contemporary cultural-ecological challenges.” (Catherine Rigby, Professor of Environmental Humanities, Bath Spa University, UK)

“Given the important role that Lord Byron’s short but massively influential poem ‘Darkness’ played in the development of eco-criticism, the lack of a systematic examination of Lord Byron’s views of nature and his function with the development of green romanticism has been both frustrating and perplexing. However, with the appearance of Drew Hubbell’s convincingly argued, strongly written and thoroughly researched Byron’s Nature, this deficiency has now been addressed in exemplary fashion. … Hubbell’s corrective work is a must read for those interested in the critical and historical emergence of ecocriticism in the field, which led to the development of green romanticism … and to so much more.” (Mark Lussier, Senior Sustainability Scholar at the Global Institute of Sustainability, Arizona State University, USA)

J. Andrew Hubbell is Associate Professor of English at Susquehanna University, Selinsgrove, USA, and Adjunct Professor at University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia.