Wordsworth¡¦s Ecological Concepts Abstract The purpose of this thesis is to explore Wordsworth¡¦s concepts of ecology, with emphasis on the relationship between human community and the natural world. Since ecology is closely related to man and nature, it is necessary to discuss man¡¦s relations with the natural world. In Wordsworth¡¦s works, we see many ecological concepts such as man¡¦s adaptation to his habitats, the mutual relationship between people and nature, and the catastrophic results of people¡¦s intervention with the natural world; however, his ecological ideas are often overlooked by critics. Therefore, in this thesis, I would like to examine Wordsworth¡¦s works from an ecological point of view. In the first chapter, I discuss Wordsworth¡¦s ecological concepts, with emphasis on how human beings can live in harmony with the living environment. My discussion shows how Wordsworth advocates a harmonious relationship between man and nature and how he insists that man should be an engaged participant in his interaction with the natural environment. In the second chapter, I discuss Wordsworth¡¦s reaction to the changing living environment. I will show the changes in his living environment and examine Wordsworth¡¦s reaction to these changes. Through my discussion of his ecological concepts, I will claim that Wordsworth is an ecologist who understands the complex relationship between human beings and their dwelling places and who believes that the destruction of the natural world must impoverish human beings.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Lehigh University, 2001. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 365-371).

Thesis (Honors)--College of William and Mary, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 60-63). Also available via the World Wide Web.

Proefschrift--Amsterdam. / Bibliography: p. 170-174.

Thesis--University of Illinois. / Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

Spontaneous feeling has been a cornerstone of Romantic aesthetics since Wordsworth wrote his Preface to Lyrical Ballads. This dissertation unsettles the link between Romantic poetry and the overflow of emotion by arguing that writers from Wordsworth to Emerson persistently turned to Stoicism in reconsidering the role of the passions in both literature and the conduct of life. Drawing on poetry and a broad range of journals, letters, and intellectual prose, I argue that the Romantics were attuned to the way diffuse Stoic attitudes informed the politics and moral psychology of their age. More than a prompt for resignation or acquiescence, Stoicism was a radical and controversial term in a revolutionary age; philosophers like Kant, Spinoza, and Godwin drew on Stoic accounts of the passions in articulating their new ethical systems. In chapters on Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, and Emerson, I argue that the period most polemically invested in emotion as the mainspring of art was also captivated by the idea that aesthetic and ethical judgment demanded a transcendence of emotion. In their poetic search for "confirmed tranquillity," the writers in my transatlantic study transformed Stoicism's austerities as they confronted the limitations of sympathy and redefined their own relations to a cosmopolitan and war-torn world.

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