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
essays on climate change in Shakespeare and on “allegories of extraction” in Richard Wagner, Joseph Conrad and F. Scott Fitzgerald
a public conversation with Philippe Sands on “The Rights of Nature and the Crime of Ecocide”
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.
