Essay Titles
A list of suggested titles from which to draw, for both essays, appears below. You can
also write your own essay questions, for both essays, but you must consult with the
seminar tutor before you start writing up the essay. This requirement is for your
benefit, so please take the time to talk through the essay title, and a full essay plan,
with your tutor, a long time before the deadline. Essay questions should be
answered with reference to critical and Romantic‐period texts you have read for this
course.
1. ‘It is critically invalid to write about the world of physical nature, and the world of
text, at the same time, with the same authority, or with the same approach:
Romantic poets, their contexts, and indeed Romantic visions of nature, only exist
to us as texts. As Derrida said, “there is nothing outside the text”.’ Consider this
quotation in light of the reading you have done for this course.
2. Discuss how and why the Romantic poets thought poetry could change the
world.
3. ‘Environmental criticism in literature and the arts clearly does not yet have the
standing within the academy of such other issue‐driven discourses as those of
race, gender, sexuality, class, and globalisation.’ (Lawrence Buell, The Future of
Environmental Criticism, 129). Consider the extent to which ‘environmental
criticism’ should or should not have the same ‘standing’ as other ‘issue‐driven’
critical approaches.
4. ‘The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars / Did wander darkling in the
eternal space, / Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth / Swung blind and
blackening in the moonless air…’ (Byron, ‘Darkness’). Why and in what ways do
the Romantics imagine and explore death of humanity, and of the natural world?
5. ‘All sighed when lawless law's enclosure came’ (John Clare, ‘The Mores’). Was
John Clare right to be so angry about enclosure?
6. ‘Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal / Large codes of fraud and woe…’
(Percy Shelley, ‘Mont Blanc’). Why did the Romantic poets believe so strongly in
the liberating power of the natural world?
7. The perspective of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge ‘may
legitimately be termed an ecological view of the natural world, since their poetry
consistently expresses a deep and abiding interest in the Earth as a dwellingplace
for all living things.’ (James C. McKusick, Green Writing: Romanticism and
Ecology, 29). Do you agree with McKusick’s characterisation of Wordsworth and
Coleridge, and can the same ‘ecological view’ be found in other writers of the
Romantic period?
8. Explore the relationship between Romantic subjectivity and the natural world in
texts you have read for this course.
9. ‘Ecocritics, to do something genuinely meaningful… must offer readers a broader,
deeper, and perhaps more explicit explanation of how and what environmental
literature communicates than the writers do themselves, immersed as they are in
their own specific narratives. Crucial to this ecocritical process of pulling things
(ideas, texts, authors) together and putting them in perspective is our awareness
of who and where we are.’ (Scott Slovic, Going Away to Think: Engagement,
Retreat and Ecocritical Responsibility, 34). Discuss with reference to texts and
contexts you have encountered on this course.
10. ‘Prophets proclaiming imminent catastrophe are nothing new in the history of
Western culture... The approach of inevitable doom has become the
conventional wisdom of the late twentieth century.’ (Ronald Bailey, Eco‐Scam:
The False Prophets of Ecological Apocalypse, 2). How significant is
‘apocalypticism’ a factor in the environmental discourse of Romanticism, and
how might it relate to the environmental discourse of the twenty‐first century?
11. Is the response of the Romantics to nature always gendered?
12. Following other critics, Greg Garrard (Ecocriticism, 1–15) suggests that we should
always be aware of the rhetorical devices which environmental writers deploy to
get us thinking in certain ways about nature and about our relationship to it.
Consider the implications of the rhetorical strategies of two or more Romanticperiod
writers in their ‘construction’ of nature.
13. Deep ecology ‘identifies the dualistic separation of humans from nature... as the
origin of environmental crisis’ (Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism, 21). Do Romantic
writers follow this same distinction between man and nature, or do they close
the gap?
14. Consider the ways in which contemporary creative artists have responded to
John Clare’s legacy, and explore the possible intentions they might have in
deciding using, and re‐writing, Clare. You may refer to any novelists, prose
writers, poets, artists, and musicians you find.
15. ‘John Clare is a poet of loss of the natural world, and this is the central reason
Mabey, Sinclair, Foulds and others are fascinated by him: contemporary society
has itself lost all connection with a natural world which it has ruined
irredeemably. Society’s only recourse is nostalgic sentimentality.’ Discuss.
16. ‘A separation between man and nature is not simply the product of modern
industry or urbanism; it is a characteristic of many earlier kinds of organized
labour, including rural labour.’ (Raymond Williams, ‘Ideas of Nature’, [1972],
Culture and Materialism, [Verso, 2005], 82). Discuss with reference to both
Romantic texts and contemporary texts.