The Commons
Relevant Publications
The Eighteenth-Century Ecologies Network aims to bring together the many diverse strands of ecologically-oriented work in the eighteenth-century humanities. As such, we wish to highlight relevant, influential, and cutting edge publications in our field, allowing (as in our seminars) the law of the good neighbour to instruct, inspire, and certainly to surprise.
Jeremy Davies, 'Romantic Ecocriticism: History and Prospects.' Literature Compass, 15, no. 9 (2018).
This comprehensive and rich introduction to ecological approaches to Romanticism (and the long eighteenth century) from Jeremy Davies is an indispensable guide to the diverse approaches to the ecological humanities that the ECEN aims to bring into dialogue.
Tess Somervell, ‘The Romantic Sublime and Environmental Crisis’. In The Cambridge Companion to the Romantic Sublime, edited by Cian Duffy. Cambridge University Press, 2023.
Tess Somervell's examination, here, of the ecocritical possibilities of a certain strain within Romantic aesthetics goes some way to emphasising the ecological possibilities of eighteenth-century studies at large: Somervell recounts the critical recuperation of a distinctly eighteenth-century means of looking at the world as a tool for thinking the environmental crisis.
Francesca MacKenney. ‘“Autumn”: John Clare and the Altered Fenland’. Studies in Romanticism 63, no. 1 (2024): 1–23.
The long tradition of ecological John Clare scholarship has typically mined Clare's poetry for ahistorical notions of dwelling amongst nature, notions he is particularly apt to supply. Francesca MacKenney, however, somewhat subverts this tradition here, by placing ecocritical commonplaces about Clare---his relation to small details, for instance---in the context of the historically specific ecological changes to which he was witness.
Kate Singer, 'Limpid Waves and Good Vibrations: Charlotte Smith’s New Materialist Affect'. Essays in Romanticism 23, no. 2 (2016), pp. 175–192.
Kate Singer offers affect, here, as an alternative way into considering Charlotte Smith’s materialism. Focusing on the waves and winds in the poet's Sonnets, Singer reveals an 'ecology of affect' that breaks down categories of the human and nonhuman into a posthuman awareness that 'undoes the anthropocentric tendencies of the industrial, imperial project'.
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz et al. La nature en révolution: Une histoire environnementale de la France, 1780–1870. La Découverte, 2025.
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, France's leading ecological historian, and his colleagues have put together a truly spectacular environmental history of France, one fully conscious of the complex interplay of nature and capitalism. Of particular interest, both to those concerned with French or environmental history and to Romanticists such as ourselves, is a chapter on the ecological questions that were, surprisingly, central to Revolutionary debates.
