Nature Writing

This chapter emphasizes the complexity, diversity, and rhetorical self-consciousness of Romantic prose nature writing. It begins with two foundational figures: Gilbert White and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. White’s influential book, The Natural History of Selborne (1789), focuses on the dynamic processes of nonhuman nature. Rousseau’s botanical writings are confessional and therapeutic, but also formally self-conscious. Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals occupy a middle ground between White and Rousseau, bringing together details of domestic life and an interest in the agency of nonhuman forces. The chapter then examines how Charlotte Smith engages with the legacy of White and Rousseau in a series of rich generic experiments that move between prose and poetry. Part three addresses ecomimesis and its limitations in the prose of John Clare and the art of Thomas Bewick. It ends with James Hogg’s ‘Storms’, a short story about the entanglement of nonhuman and human forces and the power of nature writing itself.