Chapter 9 considers Emerson’s first revolutionary book of 1836, Nature. Even in this first book, Goodman argues, Emerson presents a nascent epistemology of moods. The discussion then turns to the moody swings of “Nature,” from the Essays, Second Series, in which Emerson finds the natural world either bountifully present or just missed, and as taking two opposing forms: a stable finished form he calls natura naturata, and a dynamic form he calls natura naturans. At the end of the essay, Emerson abandons this main set of oppositions in a leap to a metaphysical conclusion. The Coda considers Emerson’s attraction to Michael Faraday’s idea that “we do not arrive at last at atoms, but at spherules of force.”

“The Poet” is what Adorno calls a “carpet essay,” which weaves its announced topics of the poet and poetry into a host of other subjects: character and expression; reception and abandonment; beauty and love; the present, new, and near; the Neoplatonic One or “whole”; and a fundamental “flowing” or “metamorphosis.” Chapter 8 focuses on Emerson’s romantic and proto-existentialist pronouncement that “the man is only half himself, the other half is his expression”; his theory that language “is fossil poetry”; and the proto-pragmatic picture of language in his statement that “all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead.” Other topics treated are the place of what Kant calls “unbounded” ideas in Emerson’s account of poetry, thinking as a mixture of reception and activity, and the connections and differences of “Experience” and “The Poet.”

This chapter examines the changing reception of Charles Harpur’s poetry. Firstly, it considers the valuing of Harpur as a nature poet, and secondly, the impact of literary theory on interpretative approaches. It then outlines a third phase that is text-historical or text-critical, and which is attentive to the poems’ multiple moments of composition and revision. The chapter discusses Harpur’s navigation of colonial readership, and how he experimented with a range of voices. It includes an examination of his translations that are related, in part, to Harpur’s fascination with the role of the poet and with other poets, such as Coleridge.

Chapter 2 continues the thread from Chapter 1, moving from objections against Kant in animal ethics to broader concerns in environmental philosophy. I begin with problematic passages from Kant’s critical texts such as the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals and the Critique of Pure Reason. While Kant does not discuss the environment, the standard interpretation of Kant suggests that nature has no intrinsic value and that environments are of mere instrumental worth. Environmental philosophers are warranted to suspect that Kant’s critical philosophy may be a nonstarter given its apparent dualism and anthropocentrism. Next, I examine three camps of Kant defenders who challenge these suspicions. Some commentators defend Kant’s system, others modernize him, and some synthesize Kant with other philosophers such as Aristotle. I assess the merits of their arguments, ultimately recommending a move beyond the standard reading to address the climate crisis.

In this chapter, we look at a number of disciplines that study human behavior, noting that the nature–nurture issue plays a central role in all of them, albeit leading to divergent views and controversies. I select some key disciplines, making no effort to be complete. My main goal is to show that every study of human behavior inevitably asks what the roles are of innate factors and of a variety of environmental factors, and how they interact. In all cases, we find defenders of more nativist/rationalist and more empiricist approaches. I will reiterate that this debate is not only relevant to academics: Views on the roles of nature and nurture have a direct impact on many aspects of daily human life. All people will sooner or later have to take a stance on issues that concern their own lives or the lives of others, including their children, parents, or friends. It is important to see how views that different people hold with respect to, for example, education and equality, are ultimately dependent on how they think (often subconsciously), or what biases they have, about human nature and human diversity.

This chapter is an extended argument for the existence of value (including moral) properties in the natural world, refusing thereby the equation of nature with what the natural sciences study. The argument turns on considerations of agency, seeking to establish that we could not be said to have the agency we manifestly possess, if value properties were not in the world we inhabit. Appealing to considerations found in Gareth Evans about the nature of belief, the chapter extends those considerations to take in our notion of desires as well, and draws from that extension the chapter’s grounds for saying that only if there are value properties without can our states of mind within possess the motivational power that makes possible our agency.

Michael Field’s notion of ecology includes as fundamental components of their sense of being not only the external elements with which humans interact but also the gestures of curiosity, invitation, and emotional outreach themselves. In conceptualising the act of writing as part of this interspecies mutual realisation, they grappled with the conundrum of existing within their environment while seemingly being forced to render it from an external vantage point. This chapter proposes that they address the issue not simply through formal and other writerly innovations that depict their eco-relationality but also by encouraging a sense of their writing as an actual part of this network of emotional linkages and potentialities. Focusing primarily on their play, William Rufus, and a section of their diaries, this chapter explores that this is an undertaking less invested in reifying an eco-queer identity than in breaching the knowledge structure that scaffolds the concept of identity itself.

This chapter explores Michael Field’s complex engagement with Romanticism, particularly their poetic and philosophical filiations with Keats, Shelley, and Wordsworth. While Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper express a desire to break free from literary precursors, their writings reveal a dynamic relationship with Romantic ideals that is enriched by their collaborative and sensory aesthetic. Analysing Bradley and Cooper’s life-writing and lyrics, the chapter focuses on their sensual interaction with the natural world, their pursuit of a posthumous life in letters, and their redefinition of the Sublime to accommodate shared ecstatic pleasure. Understanding Michael Field’s place in literary history requires a capacious approach to periodisation that acknowledges the fluidity between Romanticism and the Victorian era, particularly in their blending of Romantic and decadent sensibilities.

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.