Research project
British Romantic Writing and Environmental Catastrophe
- Start date: -
- End date: -
- Funder: Arts and Humanities Research Council
- Primary investigator: Professor David Higgins
- Co-investigators: 01011952
Partners and collaborators
The Wordsworth Trust, The Poetry Society
Description
Funded through an AHRC Leadership Fellowship awarded to Dr David Higgins, this project is the first major investigation of environmental catastrophe in Romantic-period writing.
As distinct from terms like ‘disaster’, catastrophe – from the Greek meaning an overturning, a sudden turn, a conclusion – indicates a major shift in the state of things that may well be destructive, but is not necessarily so. The environmental catastrophes addressed by this project include the heat death of the universe in Lord Byron’s ‘Darkness’, the destruction of humanity ‘by deluge’ in Book Five of William Wordsworth’s The Prelude, the geological separation of the British Isles from mainland Europe in Charlotte Smith’s ‘Beachy Head’, and the joyous apocalypse at the end of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound.
Publications and outputs
Please see: https://romanticcatastrophe.leeds.ac.uk/publications/