 | William Wordsworth and the Ecology of Authorship 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. Scott Hess, Associate Professor of English at Earlham College, is the author of Authoring the Self: Self-Representation, Authorship, and the Print Market in British Poetry from Pope through Wordsworth. |
