Semester

Spring

Date of Graduation

2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Type

PhD

College

Eberly College of Arts and Sciences

Department

English

Committee Chair

Adam Komisaruk

Committee Co-Chair

Timothy Sweet

Committee Member

Timothy Sweet

Committee Member

Lara Farina

Committee Member

Onno Oerlemans

Abstract

This dissertation explores the ecological politics of movement in Romantic literature. It contributes to a growing body of scholarship that investigates the important role that walking played in nineteenth-century literary culture. Many authors from this period cast walking as a practice that frees up not only the body but the mind as well, as the steady rhythm of the feet lulls the walker into a state of self-absorbed introspection and heightened creativity. Because of this, walking was a celebrated part of the creative process for many writers. The freedom they celebrate is possible, however, only in spaces that are level, clear, and accommodating to the human gait. This understanding of walking, though valid and consequential, cannot account for movement in more complex environments. Such environments disrupt the easy rhythms of walking and demand different kinds of movement (e.g., creeping, plodding, crawling, and scrambling) as well as focused outward attention. In work by Henry David Thoreau, Dorothy Wordsworth, John Clare, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, I find that these environments disrupt not only the travelers’ movement but also their intentions: plan ahead as they may, their journeys are altered and guided by the contingencies of the environments through which they move. In these travel accounts, individual travelers must negotiate their own goals and interests (be they aesthetic, pragmatic, or otherwise) with the sometimes conflicting interests of a varied and complex material world. I read these texts through the lens of Jane Bennet’s vibrant materialism to demonstrate the ways in which these variations of walking evoke, on the one hand, an acknowledgment of the travelers’ own materiality (thus resituating them within the physical world from which mental wandering might abstract them) and, on the other hand, a heightened sense of the presence and liveliness of the material world around them. The result is a toppling of the ontological hierarchy that places the human apart from and above all else. This shift in understanding motivates in the traveler (and, perhaps, in the reader as well) a disposition of ecological care—that is, an ethical imperative to move and act more conscientiously, with a goal of honoring the vitality of all.

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