Reclaiming Romanticism is the latest addition to Bloomsbury’s Environmental Cultures series, which is edited by Greg Garrard and Richard Kerridge. Featuring other notable titles on climate change poetics, ecospectrality, radical animism, cognitive ecopoetics and nerd ecologies, Environmental Cultures is quickly becoming one of the most exciting selections of cutting-edge research in ecocriticism.
While there is much in Reclaiming Romanticism that will be of value to contemporary scholarship, the focus of Kate Rigby’s discussion is predominantly historical: her ambition, she writes, is to reclaim ‘the inheritance of European Romanticism’ as part of a ‘strategic recovery of European counter-traditions’. The value of such traditions in colonial contexts is that they might contribute to ‘creative conversation with Indigenous understandings and practices’ (189). Without such recovery, Rigby argues, the danger is that colonisers will have nothing to offer any shared, decolonial vision While listening, learning, responsibility and solidarity remain ‘essential praxis’ for decolonisation (189),…