Ecocriticism

Jonathan is widely credited as the inaugurator of literary ecocriticism in Britain. He coined the phrase in the pioneering Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (Routledge, 1991, Routledge Revival edition 2013) and developed his theory of “ecopoetics” in a book of wide literary, historical and philosophical range, The Song of the Earth (Picador/Harvard UP, 2000), which was described by the London Sunday Times as “a work of literary criticism that may become - deserves to become - the most influential of its time.”

His other work in the field includes

• the editing of Green Romanticism (a special issue of the journal Studies in Romanticism)

• the introduction to The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism, ed. Laurence Coupe (London and New York: Routledge, 2000)

• the inaugural Michael Donaghy Memorial Lecture on “The Green Line in Contemporary Poetry”

• a series of public lectures at Arizona State University on How the Humanities can Save the Planet

• a review-essay in the Times Literary Supplement on the idea of Arcadia

• a running theme of sustainability (psychological, social and environmental) in the prize-winning biographies John Clare (2004), Ted Hughes (2015) and Radical Wordsworth: The Poet who changed the World (2020)

• Romantic Ecology Revisited: a gathering of essays revisiting and extending the themes of Romantic Ecology

• forthcoming essays on climate change in Shakespeare and on “allegories of extraction” in Richard Wagner, Joseph Conrad and F. Scott Fitzgerald

• The 2023 James Merrill Lecture - “Near the Ocean: Rachel Carson and the New England Poets”

• leadership of a Blue Humanities Initiative at ASU

• and a book-in-progress, on the idea of The Garden as the place where culture and nature meet.