Book contents
- Exhausted Ecologies
- Exhausted Ecologies
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Places of Rest
- Chapter 1 Nature’s Reserves: Rural Exhaustion, Inertia, and Generative Aesthetics
- Chapter 2 Urban Environs: James Joyce and the Politics of Shared Atmosphere
- Chapter 3 Waste Lands: Dark Pastoral in T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and Djuna Barnes
- Chapter 4 Uprooting Empire: Jean Rhys and Unrest in Imperial Centers
- Chapter 5 Decolonizing Ecology: Chinua Achebe’s New Forms of Unease
- Conclusion: The Limits of Modernist Regeneration
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 1 - Nature’s Reserves: Rural Exhaustion, Inertia, and Generative Aesthetics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 January 2020
- Exhausted Ecologies
- Exhausted Ecologies
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Places of Rest
- Chapter 1 Nature’s Reserves: Rural Exhaustion, Inertia, and Generative Aesthetics
- Chapter 2 Urban Environs: James Joyce and the Politics of Shared Atmosphere
- Chapter 3 Waste Lands: Dark Pastoral in T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and Djuna Barnes
- Chapter 4 Uprooting Empire: Jean Rhys and Unrest in Imperial Centers
- Chapter 5 Decolonizing Ecology: Chinua Achebe’s New Forms of Unease
- Conclusion: The Limits of Modernist Regeneration
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Founded in 1912 by Charles Rothschild, of the Society for the Promotion of Nature Reserves took a modern approach to preservation through the science of ecology, enlisting “Botanical Bolsheviks” such as Arthur George Tansley in order to protect entire ecosystems. What started as a promising venture quickly ran into impediments with the outbreak of World War I and the requisitioning of land for military purposes under the Defense of the Realm Act. I consider these early environmental activities in light of shifting aesthetic uses of nature occurring concurrently in literature. I contrast Edward Marsh’s Georgian Poetry anthologies to T. E. Hulme’s refutation of Romantic “limitlessness” and turn towards a classical verse that remains “mixed up with earth.” D. H. Lawrence’s novel The Rainbow registers of changes to a rural English marsh community during industrialization through a new rhythmic form that foregrounds bodily experience during rapid environmental transformation. I explore Lawrence’s ideas of “positive inertia” that he develops in his Study of Thomas Hardy as a generative form of rest arising from the individual’s connection to material surroundings.
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- Exhausted EcologiesModernism and Environmental Recovery, pp. 37 - 66Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020