“Better Lore” of the Romantic Coast: Maritime Ecologies and Cultural Infrastructure from England, Scotland, and Beyond

ABSTRACT

This essay adapts presentations the authors shared at the Edge Hill NASSR/BARS conference in the Summer of 2022 into a collaboratively constructed discussion. It reflects on what a recent “coastal turn” in ecocriticism, critical geography, and related fields might contribute to Romantic studies, and considers how coastal geographies (real and imagined) have informed aesthetics, politics, and lived experience, especially in settler-colonial contexts. Ranging from seventeenth-century poetry to contemporary fiction, from British waterways to the Mississippi Basin, it strives to bring Romantic accounts of coastal life into conversation with current modes of ecological thought and new forms of theoretical interrogation.

Acknowledgments

Funding for this paper was provided by the UKRI Natural Environment Research Council, The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and Good Systems, a research grand challenge at the University of Texas at Austin.

Notes

1 On Charlotte Smith’s coastal poetics, see O’Quinn.

2 For the fuller version of this argument, see Baker.

3 See Grant on Loch Aoineart and St Kilda.

4 Archeological studies in Scotland in the nineteenth century were still largely conducted via textualist imperatives of eighteenth-century antiquarianism. See Marsden.