In “Romantic Nature,” Mark S. Cladis surveys nature’s role in French, German, British, and North American Romanticism, with particular attention to the ideas of Rousseau, Dorothy Wordsworth, William Wordsworth, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau. Addressing the concept’s ideological baggage, Cladis highlights how Romantic nature has been interpreted in Marxist, new historicist, and ecocritical theory. Analyzing the Romantic nature writing of W. E. B. Du Bois, Cladis demonstrates how Romantic representations of nature tend toward political engagement, challenging forms of institutional oppression such as colonialism and racism. Romantic nature, Cladis argues, isn’t particularly romantic (in a sentimental sense) and is conceptually and ideologically broader than many scholars have assumed.