The Introduction begins with a description of the final days in the life of Sofia’s main thermal bath that in 1913 stood in the city’s historic center as the last representative of the Ottoman approach to place-making. I show how the decision to demolish one of the structures most characteristic of Sofia’s Ottoman experience cleared the path for the formulation of the national narrative of Sofia’s history. The narrative that still dominates both the scholarly and popular ideas of Sofia’s urbanistic identity is based on an ideologically biased interpretation of the Ottoman understanding of urban space, natural resource management, and public works. In the Introduction, I argue that Sofia’s key position within the Ottoman political and institutional landscapes as well as its role as a hub of cultural and technological exchange make the study of its history a good vantage point for overcoming the artificial spatial boundaries that still divide the research of the European, Asian, and African provinces of the Ottoman Empire. The Introduction shows how the environmental characteristics of Sofia and the Sofia plain make water the most natural and effective thematic pivot for the study of the construction and historical evolution of space and place.

Ecocriticism is catching up with James Joyce. Moving beyond the heritage of Romanticism’s binary opposition between human and nonhuman nature, contemporary critics have explored the entanglement of nature, culture, and the built environment in Joyce’s works. This chapter focuses on Joyce’s evolving presentation of the human body as a natural–cultural entity. His early fictions depict the body as a humbling counterweight to notions of transcendence, especially to Catholic ideas glorifying the spirit. The evolution of his thinking culminates in his portrayal of the body, in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, as a site of constant transformation, where the human and the nonhuman interpenetrate and shape each other. An influential concept of material ecocriticism is Stacy Alaimo’s ‘trans-corporeality’, which reveals the interlinkage and imbrication of our bodies with each other and ‘more-than-human nature’. Thus, in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, even biologically dead bodies of the solar system intersect the characters’ lives, through both their material environments and the senses, microbes, and atoms of their bodies.

Chapter 6 takes up the best-known bookish metaphor: the book of nature. Tracing the phrase “book of nature” and its attendant metaphors through early modern English writing, this chapter shows how its Christian use did not fully disappear when the metaphor suddenly flipped to work in service of the modern scientific method. The “book of nature” gave people a language for knowledge in a rapidly changing epistemology.

This chapter demonstrates how John Muir’s association with Yosemite defined its significance as a National Park and played a key role in the formation of modern environmentalism. Muir was deeply influenced by Wordsworth, Thoreau, and Burns and by the model of the landscape of genius in general. Muir represented nature in Yosemite as a form of high culture, analogous to the fine arts, in ways that defined the National Park as an institution and have exerted massive influence on modern discourses of nature. That high-cultural version of nature then shaped the American environmental movement, especially through the long political struggle from 1907–13 over the proposal to dam the Hetch Hetchy Valley as a reservoir for the city of San Francisco. In that struggle, Muir and his allies embraced many of the same forms of environmental rhetoric of the landscape of genius initiated by earlier attempts to preserve Wordsworth’s Lake District: a transatlantic connection that launched the American environmental movement and evolved into a hegemonic form of twentieth-century environmentalism.

This chapter explores the overall significance of genius in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as it became associated with authorship, the fine arts, and nature in ways that helped produce a new form of cultural nationalism. The Romantic idea of genius supported new versions of both autonomous individualism and national identity, as readers identified through the genius of representative “great men” with the nation. Genius in this way simultaneously individuated and connected, playing a key role in the formation of national high cultures and canons as well as the overall creation of a liberal democratic social order. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, genius also became increasingly associated with wild and sublime nature, naturalizing these newly emerging forms of social identity and laying the groundwork for the landscape of genius.

This chapter explores the significance of race for the landscape of genius in relation to the overall racial construction of nature in American society. It focuses on Frederick Douglass’s attempt to establish his own landscape of genius at his estate at Cedar Hill in Ancostia, overlooking Washington DC. Douglass was famous for his genius as an orator and as an abolitionist and civil rights activist. This chapter also demonstrates his deep immersion in nineteenth-century discourses of literary landscape and nature. By seeking to naturalize his genius in the Cedar Hill landscape, Douglass affirmed not only his full cultural citizenship in the nation but also, as a representative figure, the cultural rights and status of all African Americans. Cedar Hill was memorialized after Douglass’s death and eventually became a National Historic Site, but its racial associations disqualified it as “nature” in the dominant White environmental imagination, obscuring this important aspect of Douglass’s identity.

The human being is freely ‘self-determined’ rather than determined through some external authority (whether theological or teleological). This dichotomy conveniently expresses the usual understanding of modern political thought’s divergence from preceding tradition. By comparison, pre-modernity is teleological, anthropomorphic, realist; in a word, naïve – with its substantively rational nature, dictating essential ends to which we are subject. These received truths are past due for a re-examination. Just how naïve or dogmatic was the Greek understanding of freedom and nature? In this chapter, I argue that Plato’s view of man as naturally political is more complex and multivalent than our historical categorizations allow. Nevertheless, there is a sense in which, for him, politics does indeed depend upon a natural model. That model, however, is the Idea of the Good. And here, where Plato seems furthest from us, lies his greatest challenge to contemporary understandings of nature and freedom.

The nature of all existence is relationships. This chapter discusses how spirituality is a being’s relationships with all forms of existence and phenomena. For human beings, spirituality means accessing cognitive and physical capacities in order to find and establish connections with the universe. Human spirituality is a secular form of practice and belief that focuses on the autonomy of the person. There is an encouragement to explore personal freedom and to develop relationships with the natural world. This chapter focuses on why connections with others, animals, nature, weather, and natural environments is a critical aspect of the social and emotional intelligences.

This chapter analyses the spiritual ideas on universal peace developed by Sri Lankan teacher Bawa Muhaiyaddeen in terms of their South Asian and North American cultural syncretism and his development of classical Sufi ideas of the microcosmic ‘Perfect Man’ into a globalised but decidedly anti-modern ‘cosmopiety’.

‘The task of criticism', Johnson writes, ‘is to establish principles.’ One principle which forms the background to much of Johnson’s literary criticism is that of human fallibility. Writers and their works usually contain a mixture of great virtues and serious defects, and Johnson often takes a balancing-scales approach. He is also keenly aware of historical context, arguing that authors must be understood through the books the authors themselves read, and taking an interest in the details of book production. As for critical judgement, Johnson approves of works which reveal the universality of human nature – hence his love of Homer, and, conversely, his strictures on the Metaphysical poets. As well as being accountable to truth and nature, the writer is also accountable to the reader, and by extension the ‘public’ and ‘mankind’. Above all, literature must pay its due to religion – though this is precisely the area where literature is likely to fall short.

Vitruvius’ De architectura (c. 35–23 BCE) offers an ideal lens through which to view the emergence of the Imperial artes. In the introduction to his work, Vitruvius develops an elaborate theory of architectural knowledge that connects the discipline with other branches of specialized knowledge and gives pride of place to causal explanations of architectural method via natural first principles. Vitruvius’ theory is tailored to architecture but is of wider importance in that it establishes a general notion of ars predicated on the scientific premises sketched in Chapter 2. True to his expansive conception of the discipline, throughout his treatise Vitruvius carefully explains his methods in terms of natural first principles, demonstrating their fundamental soundness. His advice for orienting city streets and walls (Book I) and for choosing building materials (Book II) exemplifies his characteristic interest in connecting architecture with a broader understanding of nature.

The artes, in the sense of systematic treatises on various disciplines of specialized knowledge, are not well understood today because they are usually studied in isolation from one another. This book argues that the artes of the early Roman Empire—the period of the greatest flourishing of this kind of literature—belong to a common intellectual culture and ought to be studied together. Their unity stems ultimately from a shared preoccupation with relating theory to practice vis-à-vis disciplinary expertise. Within the artes, the theory–practice problem stimulated the emergence of theories of knowledge and theories of nature embedding Roman specialized knowledge in a broader understanding of the world. Indeed, the artes crystallize a uniquely Roman scientific culture that has not been previously recognized as such. The aim of this book is to study this scientific culture.

The artes of the early Roman Empire are much more than manuals or handbooks intended to communicate the elements of practical expertise: they are vehicles for the articulation of Roman understandings of nature, knowledge, and society. This intellectual culture is premised on a theoretically sophisticated notion of ars that developed in the late Republic. It deserves to be regarded as a scientific culture because inter alia the artes elaborate different theories of nature and knowledge, draw upon many branches of ancient scientific inquiry, and employ methods characteristic of ancient scientific thought and practice. The artes Romanize specialized knowledge insofar as they plot their scientific contents along the geographic and temporal axes of Roman power. Ultimately, the artes constitute a unified intellectual phenomenon and should be studied as a part of the scientific culture to which they belong.

This chapter argues that what Gerard Manley Hopkins termed the “rural scene” provided a focal point in the 1870s for profound changes in the Victorian understanding, valuation, and transformation of the natural world. British writing at this time demonstrates a shift from viewing the rural scene as picturesque landscape, as evidenced in provincial novels such as George Eliot’s Middlemarch, to conceiving of it as an environment encompassing human and nonhuman nature, notably in Richard Jefferies’ nature writings and Thomas Hardy’s first Wessex novels. Grasping the full scope of Victorian responses to the rural scene in the 1870s also requires looking to the expanding pastoral industries of the settler empire. Writing in and about the settler colonies of Australia and New Zealand, by Lady Barker, Rolf Boldrewood, and Anthony Trollope, highlights how a perceived absence of rural aesthetic values helped render colonial nature available for transformation and subsequent economic exploitation.

“Anthropology from an Aesthetic Point of View” presents a major reassessment of Kantian anthropology, correcting a tendency, common in Kant scholarship and in broader debates about race, to view Enlightenment race theory solely through the lens of moral or political philosophy. Keeping the practical stakes firmly in the frame, I shift our understanding of Kant’s anthropology away from a moral register and toward an aesthetic one, arguing that the Critique of Judgment predicates the perfection of racialized bodies on their conformity to an ideal form or “shape [Gestalt].” These ideal forms, I contend, then serve as the crux of Kant’s mature race theory and the post-Kantian anthropologies examined in the next chapter.

The chapter explores the connection between the emergence of Nature as an independent entity and the rise of modern democracy. It argues that the separation of Nature from God and Culture shaped democratic practices. Nature became a political resource in democratic society, providing concepts like “necessity” and “constraint.” Modern scholarly discourses often invoke Nature as a limit and source of legitimation for political claims. It further examines how the imaginary of Nature as an autonomous entity influenced the rise of modern democracy. It argues that the separation of Nature from God and Culture created space for human agency and democratic practices. It also discusses how Nature became a source of authority, necessity, and constraint in modern political discourses. Lastly, the chapter compares Western cosmology with non-Western ones and analyzes the impact of cosmological shifts on politics.