\n\nWith this lyrical, insightful book on urbanature (emphasis on the second syllable: ub-ban<\/em><\/strong>-ature), Nichols (Dickinson College) makes a significant contribution to the evolving field of eco-criticism and to the prestigious “Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters” series. Nichols inches toward the interdisciplinary by including architecture, natural history, cultural studies, and evolutionary biology within the purview of literary studies. A Wordsworth and Thoreau scholar with a background in journalism, Nichols fuses studies in the Romantics with his own understanding of big ideas, for example, the “great chain of being,” evolution, and natural history. Structured as a nature-writing journal beginning in spring and ending in spring, this green response to modernism finds such progenitors as the ancient Egyptian god Anubis (wild and human) and Blake’s Romantic “tyger” no less a part of the human force than the lamb. Although Nichols claims the coinage “urbanatural roosting,” he gives credit to fellow eco-critics–including Kurt Fosso, who revised the word “animal,” and Timothy Morton, who excised the word “nature.” Combining literary, anecdotal, and philosophical perspectives, this invaluable book crossbreeds political, spiritual, scientific, and aesthetic elements within the outworn dichotomy of town and country.\u00a0Summing Up:<\/strong>\u00a0Essential. Lower-division undergraduates and above.<\/strong>\u00a0—\u00a0L. L. Johnson, Lewis & Clark College<\/em><\/h3>\n<\/h2>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n* \u00a0 * \u00a0 * \u00a0 * \u00a0 * \u00a0 * \u00a0 * \u00a0 * \u00a0 * \u00a0 *<\/h3>\n“An enjoyable read with engaging prose . . .\u00a0Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism<\/em>\u00a0is an important contribution to contemporary discussions about the future of environmentalism and how we might face the environmental challenges of our world today.”<\/h3>\n\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0—\u00a0Environmental Philosophy<\/em><\/h3>\n* \u00a0 * \u00a0 * \u00a0 * \u00a0 * \u00a0 * \u00a0 * \u00a0 * \u00a0 * \u00a0 * \u00a0 *<\/h3>\n“In\u00a0Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism<\/em>, Ashton Nichols reveals himself not just as an ecocritical scholar but as a very effective nature writer.”<\/h3>\n\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 —\u00a0Ecozon@<\/em><\/h3>\n* \u00a0 * \u00a0 * \u00a0 * \u00a0 * \u00a0 * \u00a0 * \u00a0 * \u00a0 *<\/h3>\n<\/h2>\nCollege Literature <\/em><\/h2>\n39:3 (Summer 2012): 171-73<\/em><\/h3>\nMichael Verderame University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign<\/em><\/div>\n<\/div>\n ![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.wcupa.edu\/_academics\/sch_cas.lit\/images\/frontCover.png\") I<\/span>n recent years ecological literary criticism has moved from the margins of the academy to become an increasingly mainstream mode of analysis, nowhere more so than in Romanticist circles. Early new historicist schol<\/span>arship in the 1980s tended to view Romantic writing about nature as evading fields of social, economic, and political struggle. Beginning in the 1990s, Jonathan Bate, Karl Kroeber, Lawrence Buell, James McKusick, and others sought to reassert the primacy of nature in the Romantic enterprise and to retrieve Romantic environmental thought as a foundation for a new ecopolitics appropriate to the age of global warming.Yet Romantic ecocriticism risked becoming as rigid as the new historicist skepticism it displaced, giving us a version of the Romantics that largely echoes twenty-first-century eco- logical sensibilities, and so inviting a new wave of critical and revisionary accounts.The most prominent recent intervention in Romantic ecocriticism has been led by Timothy Morton, who in a pair of influential books\u2014Ecology Without Nature<\/em>\u00a0(2007) and\u00a0The Ecological Thought<\/em>\u00a0(2010)\u2014challenged the basic assumptions of virtually all ecological thought, mainstream and radical, of the last two centuries. Morton argues that the concept of Nature is an aestheticized abstraction that feeds into anthropocentric fantasies of domination, and has done more ecological harm than good.<\/span><\/div>\n—<\/div>\n <\/div>\n Ashton Nichols\u2019s\u00a0Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism<\/em>\u00a0enters this contested terrain with a call for an environmental criticism grounded in what he calls \u201curbanature.\u201d Although Nichols\u2019s book is less iconoclastic towards mainstream ecocriticism than Morton\u2019s work, the two authors share a suspicion towards the concept of \u201cNature\u201d as it has traditionally been applied.The conventional view of nature denotes wilderness; spaces are \u201cnatural\u201d to the extent that they are uninhabited, or unaffected, by human beings, and correspondingly spaces that have been cultivated or transformed by human activity are \u201cunnatural.\u201d In accord with much recent ecocritical work, Nichols rejects this view of nature as something apart from and inherently imperiled by human civilization, and instead uses the term \u201curbanature\u201d to articulate the \u201cidea that human beings are never cut off from wild nature by human\u00a0<\/span>culture\u201d (xv). Where Morton argues that ecocriticism needs to cast off the concept of nature altogether, Nichols argues for expanding our sense of nature to encompass human beings and the spaces we cultivate and develop.<\/span>\u00a0While\u00a0Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism<\/em>\u00a0is certainly invested in these theoretical debates, it is less a polemical work than, in some ways, a reflective memoir, structured around Nichols\u2019s own lyrical, essayistic observations and musings on his encounters with nature over the course of a year. It is divided into four principal sections of three chapters each, corresponding to the seasons and months of the year, and begins and ends with the coming of spring in March.The close attention to natural description and to the author\u2019s situatedness in and around nature has become a familiar trope in ecocritical scholarship, as a sort of corrective to the tendency to divorce scholarship from embodied experience. In Nichols\u2019s hands, though, this technique never feels clich\u00e9d. Rather, the more coloristic passages of natural writing flow seamlessly into his readings of literary texts and material history, echoing Wordsworth\u2019s claim that our two great spiritual teachers are books and nature.<\/span><\/div>\n—<\/div>\n <\/div>\n Like many works of ecocriticism,\u00a0Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism<\/em>\u00a0is really two books in one: a descriptive cultural-historical study of the evolution of ideas about nature over the course of the nineteenth century, and a normative argument about what lessons these works offer in framing a social and political response to our current ecological crisis.The empirical component of Nichols\u2019s thesis will likely prove convincing to even those readers who might resist his green flourishes and unapologetically neo-Romantic orientation. For Nichols, the key transformation in ecological consciousness over the nineteenth century was the replacement of a world-view that saw nature as static and separated from humans by an understanding of nature as dynamic and interconnected. The eighteenth and nineteenth century\u2019s great revolutions in physics, chemistry, geology, and evolutionary biology both anticipated and helped to shape the conviction widely shared by Romantic writers that human consciousness and nonhuman nature are interactive and mutually constituting parts of a single system, as Nichols argues with convincing close readings of canonical Romantic poems. Nichols reads Blake\u2019s \u201cThe Fly\u201d as a \u201cdream of contact across the species boundary\u201d enabled by Romantic science\u2019s understanding of the \u201cliteral links among creatures large and small\u201d (81); he brings a new scientific precision to Shelley\u2019s \u201cThe Cloud\u201d and Keats\u2019 \u201cTo Autumn\u201d; and he demonstrates how Wordsworth\u2019s \u201cComposed upon Westminster Bridge,\u201d with its elegiac portrait of a dramatically beautiful urban vista, collapses the city-nature binary. The major Romantics emerge, in Nichols\u2019s telling, as\u00a0<\/span>more nuanced and scientifically-minded theorists of \u201cNature\u201d than we have sometimes been accustomed to think.<\/span><\/div>\n—<\/div>\n <\/div>\n Ultimately,\u00a0Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism<\/em>\u00a0is more than a conventional cultural-historical study: it aspires to change the way readers think and act as moral and political subjects in relation to the natural world. It is this radical ambition, belying the its seemingly modest scope, that will make the book valuable and interesting to readers who are neither nineteenth-century specialists, nor invested in debates in ecocritical theory. Nichols proposes that we \u201cresituate advocacy of something nonhuman \u2018for its own sake\u2019 in order to include the human\u2014the city, the suburb, the urban, urbanature\u2014in all discussions of ways that this planet (and its finite space) should be cared for and shared by human beings in the future\u201d (170). Privileging nonhuman spaces to the exclusion of the built environment, he implies, has the dangerous effect of suggesting that all \u201chuman\u201d spaces are equally dangerous and, ultimately, equally irredeemable.<\/span><\/div>\n—<\/div>\n <\/div>\n What would an \u201curbanatural roosting\u201d such as Nichols proposes look like? The concept remains a bit vague, because it would require a revolution in thinking and everyday living to collapse the dominant country-city binary; but Nichols traces the outlines in responses to ecological (post-Katrina New Orleans) and economic (deindustrialized Rust Belt) trauma. Green renewal projects in these areas, he suggests, transport some of the traditional characteristics of rural life into urban and suburban spaces.To live urbannaturally is to live in a world where \u201cnew living spaces will emerge where gardens come down into city center from the suburbs, where every house with a yard turns part of that yard into a garden for vegetables and flowers\u201d (190). Embracing an urbannatural ethic would require rejecting both anthropocentric fantasies of domination over the natural world and radical ecological primitivism, and instead underscoring the inextricability of \u201cnature\u201d and \u201cculture.\u201d I am not sure whether I would want to programatically endorse Nichols\u2019s proposal wholesale, but\u00a0Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism<\/em>\u00a0makes a valu- able contribution towards a progressive environmentalism that responds to the challenges of our contemporary moment.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *<\/h2>\n![\"Romanticism\"](\"http:\/\/www.euppublishing.com\/na101\/home\/literatum\/publisher\/eup\/journals\/covergifs\/rom\/cover.gif\") <\/div>\n \n \n \n ROMANTICISM–EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS:<\/h3>\nRomanticism\u00a0offers a forum for the flourishing diversity of Romantic studies today.<\/em><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n Ashton Nichols, Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism: Toward Urbanatural Roosting<\/em> (New York and Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 254. \u00a354 hardback. 9780230102675.<\/h4>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\nBeyond Romantic Ecocriticism: Toward Urbanatural Roosting<\/em> is a passionate, lyrical and generically diverse work that draws on equally wide-ranging resources from the Romantic period to our own. Its twelve chapters are unusually organised by the seasons and correspond to each month of a year that Ashton Nichols spent \u2018roosting\u2019 in his family cabin. \u2018Roosting\u2019, or experiencing and \u2018coming to know a precise piece of environment more clearly\u2019 (34), is only one of many new words or new meanings for words that Nichols describes as ecologically necessary for us to \u2018appreciate the richness of our widest (not just \u201cwildest\u201d) surroundings\u2019 (31). Bookended by first-person accounts of his experiences at the cabin, the body of each chapter combines observations on our contemporary ecological situation, autobiography, nature writing, anecdotes from the history of zoology, and literary criticism. These approaches are admirably interlinked and consistently directed to the book\u2019s principal aim: to introduce a new concept to contemporary debates concerning man\u2019s interconnectedness with nature. \u2018Urbanature\u2019 \u2013 which rhymes, according to Nichols, with \u2018furniture\u2019 \u2013 has already been coincidentally deployed by German experimental musicians and a Honda marketing team (xiii, xiv). But, for Nichols, it is a \u2018critical term\u2019 that must be connected to recent attempts to rethink Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment conceptions of\u00a0nature: \u2018urbanature insists that human beings are not out of nature when they stand in the streets of Manhattan any more than they are in nature when they stand above the tree-line in Montana\u2019 (ibid.). This book critiques the historical purging of indigenous humans from the land during the establishment of Yellowstone National Park and praises the more recent attempts of urban areas from Kerala to Detroit to \u2018live in harmony with their surroundings\u2019 (17, 204). It does so in order to remind us repeatedly of what Nichols describes as the \u2018seamless [. . . ] continuum that runs from the wildest wilds of north Alaska to the urbanest-urbs of South Boston, from the barest plain of Outer Mongolia to the most densely populated neighborhood of Manila\u2019 (205). In an increasingly complex and globalised world that faces disaster, Nichols wants to break down the false oppositions of urban area and wilderness, nature and culture, human and nonhuman in order to demonstrate the ecological importance of recognising urbanatural interconnections in the broadest possible oikos.<\/p>\nThis reconciliation of urban and nonurban into \u2018urbanature\u2019 mirrors the book\u2019s simultaneous attempt to unite two normally opposed bodies of thinking about the natural world: literature and science. It will come as no surprise to those who know Nichols\u2019 deservedly lauded website Romantic Natural History and its accompanying printed volume that the most impressive moments in the book make use of his knowledge of the period\u2019s zoology. This expertise in the history of science is combined with a belief in the power of literature to allow for precisely the ecocentric rather than anthropocentric approach to the natural world that he is advocating. In fact, it is clear that Nichols believes that the moment Wordsworth imagined in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads has indeed arrived (100) \u2013 a moment where the Poet will not only \u2018follow the steps of the man of Science [. . . ] but he will be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of the Science itself\u2019. Combining historical reflections with sound knowledge of recent developments, Nichols\u2019 writing moves compellingly \u2013 if occasionally a little too easily \u2013 between Romantic natural histories and contemporary science: \u2018Romantic natural history helps us to see how the \u201cNature\u201d of Isaac Newton and Linnaeus becomes, via Wordsworth and Shelley, the \u201cnature\u201d of Stephen Hawking and Stephen Jay Gould\u2019 (27\u20138). This statement demonstrates the book\u2019s tendency to claim perhaps a little too much for the poets without detailed presentation of the excellent\u00a0connecting work that other scholars have performed in the period. But there is no doubting Nichols\u2019 passion for the relevance of Romantic-period literature to contemporary ecological challenges. For this book, literature is not only important in its ability to communicate the interrelatedness of man and nature described by science, but also because its very materials are similar to and indeed may have influenced the sciences: from careful observation of similarity and difference to metaphor and even the provision of pleasure (99\u2013100, 185).<\/p>\n Justifiable assertion of what the two cultures have in common can, however, collapse frustratingly into a corresponding tendency in this book to judge literature by the standards of science. This is summarised by Nichols\u2019 deliberately breezy but, for this reviewer, harmfully oversimplifying paraphrase of Wordsworth: \u2018Take a little bit of science, add a bit of \u201cimpassioned expression\u201d: the result? Poetry\u2019 (100). It is also sometimes apparent in his closer engagement with the literature of the period. His reading of Shelley\u2019s \u2018The Cloud\u2019, for example, is representative in the heavy emphasis that it places upon scientific accuracy or, regarding Keats\u2019 nightingale, \u2018naturalistic rigor\u2019 (94, 97). To an extent, this is justified by the contextual information about the hydrological cycle and chemical intoxication that is discussed, but it limits both the literary analysis and the specificity of what poetry can do especially in the face of the ecological challenges that the book poses so well in other places. Romantic poetry\u2019s complex and problematic relation to naturalistic accuracy is, contrary to the emphasis in some of Nichols\u2019 readings, one of its most powerful resources in engaging with \u2013 rather than fleeing from \u2013 the world that it constructs and that constructs it. To use Nichols\u2019 own example once more, \u2018The Cloud\u2019 is most remarkable not for its scientific correctness but for its radical anthropomorphism of a meteorological reality and its many mutable manifestations through voicing in verse the first-person perspective of water vapour. To my mind, it is impossible to judge a powerful literary technique like this in terms of naturalistic accuracy. Furthermore, an analysis based upon such preoccupations leads both to a necessarily impoverished idea of poetry\u2019s usefulness, as well as to a buried implication that reading Romantic literature might help to solve today\u2019s ecological crisis which is arguably not as carefully theorised or interrogated as it needs to be.<\/p>\n Like other recent works about Romantic science, this book excellently conveys the excitement of the\u00a0\u2018pervasive paradigm shift\u2019 that occurred in the work of figures like Erasmus Darwin: the \u2018revolutionary turn away from a fallen version of \u201cNature\u201d that was static and unchanging toward a Romantic \u201cnature\u201d characterized by dynamic links among all living things\u2019 (xvi). It may be a concern, however, for more period-based readers that the word \u2018Romantic\u2019 is quite loosely defined \u2013 a result of Nichols\u2019 capacious use of the category to include writers from Mary Shelley to Rachel Carson, William Blake to Lawrence Buell. This ambitious scope can lead not only to Romanticism being associated strongly with \u2018ecocriticism\u2019 (as if that is what Keats and Shelley were doing at least some of the time) but also to insufficiently interrogated inconsistencies concerning the value of Romantic approaches to nature. The book\u2019s strength is its articulate and impassioned repetition of the fact that mankind is a part of nature and that nature is so often marked by mankind\u2019s influence: to use Nichols\u2019 Thoreau-infused terminology, there is no wilderness, just differing degrees of urbanatural wildness (xiii). But, while Romantic natural history is key in raising awareness of the connections between man and nature, Nichols makes this move at the expense of what he describes as \u2018Romantic ecocriticism\u2019. For Nichols, \u2018Romantic ecocriticism\u2019 is apparent not only in twentieth-century literary studies but also in a number of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts as well: it \u2018arises out of the belief that human beings once existed closer to \u201cthe state of nature\u201d\u2019 and he sketches a genealogy from the Garden of Eden to Rousseau\u2019s noble savage and even into twentieth-century anthropology (168). But, there is not enough detail to support his claim that \u2018the violence and pain of primitive life \u2013 the death, disease, destruction, and suffering of nature \u2013 is ordinarily overlooked\u2019 in earlier Romantic ecocritical accounts (ibid.). At the core of the book, evidence is cited for why Romantic writers (including Wordsworth and Mary Shelley) found Nature seductive and beautiful, but it ignores that Wordsworth was also fostered by fear as well as beauty and that Mary Shelley\u2019s Creature was \u2013 although sympathetic \u2013 also monstrous and violent (168\u20139).<\/p>\n As a result, Nichols\u2019 writing justly acknowledges that the natural world is \u2018red in tooth and claw\u2019 (to use his favourite Tennyson quotation), but the book\u2019s principal thesis denies this to what it sees as characteristically \u2018Romantic\u2019. In response to Thoreau\u2019s experience on Mount Katahdin in Maine, Nichols suggests two Thoreaus. One is the Romantic ecocritic\u00a0who \u2018like so many Romantic ecocritics before and since [. . . ] had offered up a version of nature with which readers feel at peace because they feel contented and connected\u2019; the other is, according to Nichols, the \u2018urbanatural rooster\u2019 who is \u2018at once scared, and also overwhelmed, by the harsh materialism of the objects around him\u2019 (172). For Nichols, this terror \u2018presents a view that counters Romantic ecocriticism completely and moves directly toward urbanatural roosting\u2019 (ibid.). Such a claim induces questions about the usefulness or accuracy of describing Thoreau as either an \u2018ecocritic\u2019 or an \u2018urbanatural rooster\u2019. But I also suspect that for many readers this moment will not be counter-Romantic but will instead be a reminder of one of the most Romantic sensations and tropes in the period\u2019s literature and philosophy: the Sublime. Nichols suggests that we move beyond Romantic ecocriticism by deconstructing naive versions of natural beauty into a more complicated, strange and savage world, but \u2013 while it sometimes comes out in the details \u2013 the broader argument of the book does not sufficiently articulate that many of the best examples of Romantic art and thought are already performing precisely this deconstruction. The book\u2019s desire to be both an academic monograph and a more popularly-oriented ecological polemic is a potential source of this problem. Although it is excellent at not eliding the historical differences between the challenges faced at the beginning of the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, its eagerness to reconcile destructively incompatible elements in our contemporary ecological situation makes it too easy to transcend the difficulties that are already present in so much thought and writing of the Romantic period.<\/p>\n Nevertheless, Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism is a readable and obviously well-loved project with many memorable instances of evocative nature writing, including an unusually successful hawk-watch and the death-by-lightbulb of a nest of paper-wasps (120\u20137, 137\u20139). In its timely ecological claims, the book also offers something interestingly different. A number of reviewers have linked Nichols\u2019 \u2018urbanature\u2019 to the influential thinking of Timothy Morton\u2019s \u2018ecology without nature\u2019 and this is a connection that Nichols himself encourages at the beginning and end of the book. I see, however, a significant difference in ecological temperament between Morton and Nichols\u2019 respective strategies. Although any deconstruction of a term like \u2018nature\u2019 is likely to find itself oscillating between plenitude and scarcity, Morton\u2019s more philosophically-charged critique of ecologocentrism\u00a0wants to get rid of nature altogether where Nichols wants us to see it everywhere: in cities, industrial wasteland, and suburbs as much as in national parks or pristine wilderness. It is true that this impulse is counteracted to an extent by the fact that a large portion of the book still occurs in the most time-honoured scenario of a solitary North American male chopping wood outside a cabin. But its charming utopianism with regard to modern global challenges is sincere: \u2018Imagine urban, suburban, small town, and rural places in which the water and the air are clean, in which the food is fresh, local and preservative free, in which the energy is used but also used wisely \u2013 reused and not wasted \u2013 in which human spaces are built with an eye to nonhuman needs and built to blend the inner world (of human consciousness) with the outer world (of nonhuman nature): minds and weather, emotions and plants, health and animals, vegetables and computers\u2019 (35). I am suspicious of the suggestion that the layering of more ecocritical jargon (like \u2018urbanature\u2019 and \u2018roosting\u2019) can really help counter our current ecological crisis. I also see problems with the ease of Nichols\u2019 reconciliation of mutually incompatible human and nonhuman behaviours into urbanature. But, there is no doubting that his approach offers an affirmative new tool for ecocritical thinking and another direction for further complication and consideration.<\/p>\n In the end, Nichols\u2019 ultimate thesis is admirable even as it fails to confront adequately the difficulties of such a task: \u2018Urbanatural roosting asks, simply, that the old lines of arbitrary separation \u2013 urban\/rural, city\/country, natural\/artificial \u2013 be removed; the idea claims that the populous boroughs of Manhattan and the crowded neighbourhoods of Los Angeles are not qualitatively different from the still lakes of the Adirondacks and the waving kelp beds off the Californian coast. All of these locations are equally worthy of human care and concern, all equally deserving of the attention needed to sustain them\u2019 (205). The best parts of this book affirm and reaffirm this way of living so passionately that it is difficult not to feel that it might be possible. Yet, some of the Romantic writing considered by Nichols can also be \u2013 and indeed has been \u2013 read as challenging precisely the ease with which he reconciles these \u2018arbitrary separations\u2019. This book\u2019s mixed genres (an advantage in other respects) limit its level of single-minded engagement with Romantic texts and scholarship and make it less convincing in its secondary claims that \u2018Romantic ecocriticism tended to demonize the urban\u00a0while idealizing the natural\u2019 or that \u2018the Romantic world of nature has ended\u2019 and we should move towards \u2018urbanatural roosting\u2019 (205). This reviewer is confident neither that Romantic nature was ever that simple (as Nichols himself acknowledges in parts of this book) nor that it is so easy to move beyond the insightfully incompatible complexities of Romantic thought about the natural world.<\/p>\n James Castell,<\/em>\u00a0St John\u2019s College, Cambridge. DOI: 10.3366\/rom.2013.0136<\/h4>\n\u00a0===================================<\/strong><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.cla.auburn.edu\/shr\/images\/SHR_Spring2013_Med.jpg\") <\/p>\n
Southern Humanities Review<\/em><\/h3>\n“The concept of “urbanatural roosting” is evocative. . . . Rarely does one come across a work of contemporary criticism this enjoyable to read. The organization of the book mirrors its subject matter in fascinating, experimental ways, offering seasonal readings through thirteen months,\u00a0Spring\u00a0through\u00a0Spring, Again<\/em>, chronicling a year living at the ‘Roost,’ and blending literary theory with personal history in ways that reverberate with the whirlwind music of\u00a0Walden<\/em>. The work’s poetic introspection, modeled after writers like Henry David Thoreau and Annie Dillard, offers so much hope through its imagism and plainly rendered honesty . . . Don’t let the intimacy of his work fool you. Nichols’s criticism is profound and reflects scrupulous research . . . . In keeping with its Thoreauvian style and organization, Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism<\/em> seems to call out to contemporary criticism, “simplify, simplify” (Walden<\/em>, chapter two), offering intricate readings of complex Romantic and Victorian poetics in plain language, avoiding weighty jargon and using metaphors drawn from daily experiences living at “the Roost”. . . In its clear, poetic, and joyful message\u00a0Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism<\/em>\u00a0exemplifies what it advocates: place-conscious theory that is also accessible to any greenhorn-ecocritic.” \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Madison Jones IV,\u00a0Southern Humanities Review<\/em> (2013)<\/h3>\n
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\u201cThere is a way of beholding nature,\u201d Diane Ackerman writes, \u201cwhich is a form of prayer, a way of minding something with such clarity and aliveness that the rest of the world recedes. It quiets the bitter almonds of the limbic system, and gives the brain a small vacation.\u201d The iridescent patch of nature writing that leads into these reflections comes in the middle of\u00a0One Hundred Names for Love<\/em> (2011), Ackerman\u2019s trenchant and moving account of seeing her husband through a major stroke and guiding his recovery process. Readers of Ackerman will not be surprised by her poetic take on neuroscience, nor by the sensuality of her prose as she leaves the sickroom behind to \u201cstroll awhile, empty my mind, and let it fill with the dew, quickening shadows, riot of pinks and purples low on the horizon, and then the silent gold fury of the sun\u201d (96).<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.nbol-19.org\/Mosaic_banner.jpg\")
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<\/a>In one word, \u201curbanatural,\u201d Nichols\u2019 book strives to bridge the Romantic divide between nature and culture, the rural and the city, offering instead a vision of a single, integrated ecology that seamlessly blends human and non-human beings and systems.\u00a0\u00a0There is no separate \u201cnature\u201d for us to return to, or from which we have ever been apart.\u00a0\u00a0Instead even the most urban places are entirely constituted by and dependent on the natural world, just as the most remote wildernesses have now been thoroughly mapped, imaged, and impacted by human activity.\u00a0\u00a0Refusing to lament over the \u201cend of nature,\u201d however, Nichols argues hopefully that it is time to shift our attention from the imagined boundary between the human and the natural to the more useful distinction of whether we are \u201ctaking care\u201d of places and \u201csharing\u201d resources with other beings poorly or well (192).<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.ncgsjournal.com\/NCGS200.jpg\")
<\/a><\/span><1>\u201cThe time has come for a new idea and a new word to describe that idea.\u201d So begins Ashton Nichols\u2019s\u00a0Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism: Toward Urbanatural Roosting<\/em>. \u201cThe new word is \u2018urbanature,\u2019\u201d and Nichols managed to assuage my immediate leeriness of yet another ecocritical neologism with the parenthetical statement that it \u201crhymes with \u2018furniture\u2019\u201d (xiii). This connection (which also left me trying\u2013and failing\u2013to pronounce \u201cfurnitural\u201d) is more than simply wordplay. On the contrary, Nichols\u2019s argument asks us to consider all the various forms of artifice with which we have furnished modernity as the stuff of human adaptation, little different in essence from the larder of a well-stocked squirrel\u2019s nest. To this end, Nichols\u2019s book engages three distinct but related projects: the turn from \u201canthropocentrism\u201d to \u201cecocentrism\u201d (along with their counterparts anthropomorphism\/ecomorphism); historicizing this idea in the writings of Romantic and Victorian poets and natural historians; and dramatizing an argument for the material implementation of \u201curbanatural roosting.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.cro2.org\/images\/logo.gif\"){kind=logo}
<\/span>CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries<\/h2>\n