William Wordsworth and the Ecology of Authorship

Hess explores Wordsworth’s defining role in establishing what he designates as ‘the ecology of authorship’: a primarily middle-class, nineteenth-century conception of nature associated with aesthetics, high culture, individualism, and nation. Instead of viewing Wordsworth as an early ecologist, Hess places him within a context that is largely cultural and aesthetic.

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In William Wordsworth and the Ecology of Authorship, Scott Hess explores Wordsworth's defining role in establishing what he designates as ""the ecology of authorship"": a primarily middle-class, nineteenth-century conception of nature associated with aesthetics, high culture, individualism, and nation. Instead of viewing Wordsworth as an early ecologist, Hess places him within a context that is largely cultural and aesthetic. The supposedly universal Wordsworthian vision of nature, Hess argues, was in this sense specifically male, middle-class, professional, and culturally elite -- factors that continue to shape the environmental movement today.