The Transatlantic Eco-Romanticism of Gary Snyder

by Tovey, Paige

• ISBN13: 9781137340146
• ISBN10: 1137340142
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2013-12-18
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Tracing connections between Gary Snyder and his Romantic and Transcendentalist predecessors - Wordsworth, Blake, Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau - this book explores the tension between urbanization and over-industrialization. Paige Tovey evaluates the eco-poetic workings of what Snyder himself calls "cross-fertilizations" and argues that his poetry reworks British Romantic as well as American Transcendentalist and modernist ideas and forms. This study examines the ways in which Snyder negotiates the urban and the natural, and traces the history of the Eco-Romantic poetic tradition as it is disseminated from 'Old World' to 'New World' across the Atlantic. Here, the Romantic ecopoetic tradition finds new life in Pulitzer Prize-winner Gary Snyder's poetry and poetics; and the dialectical relationship between Snyder and his predecessors reminds readers that nature is never a simple concept.

Author Biography

Paige Tovey holds a PhD in English Literary Studies from Durham University, UK where she was the recipient of a MHRA Research Associateship (2010-2012) within the Department of English. She has published on subjects ranging from the influence of Alexander Pope on Percy Bysshe Shelley to the post-Romantic poetic form of Gary Snyder.

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. The Romantic Pastoral: Snyder's Ecological Literary Inheritance
2. Snyder's Twentieth Century Eco-Romanticism
3. Romantic Aspiration, Romantic Doubt
4. Snyder's Post-Romantic Ecological Vision: The Shaman as Poet/Prophet
5. The Measured Chaos of Snyder's Eco-Poetic Form
6. Snyder's Experimentations with Post-Romantic Ecological Form
7. Mountains as Romantic Emblems of Revelation
8. Rivers as Romantic Emblems of Creation