Current PhD Student

Cal Sutherland

Thesis Title:

Wordsworth, Property, and the Environment: Towards a Marxist Ecocriticism

Supervisor:

Professor Jon Mee

Description:

When we read a poet like William Wordsworth ecologically, on what should we focus? For a long time, the answer has been his leisurely, aesthetic relationship to nature. We are asked to learn from Wordsworth’s peaceful dwelling within nature, and replace any interaction with nature through labour—so often harmful and dominatory—with such aesthetic reflections.

But it is not an inability to appreciate nature’s beauty that stands between us and an end to the climate crisis. As recent developments in Marxist ecology have shown, developments in the sphere of labour started this crisis, and it has been perpetuated there, this sphere always organised through property relations.

My thesis, ‘Wordsworth, Property, and the Environment: Towards a Marxist Ecocriticism,’ will reject forms of ecocriticism which scrape Wordsworth’s poetry for different ways individuals might think about or act in nature. Rather, I read Wordsworth’s poetry as attempting to make sense of material changes in his society through the adoption and modification of a variety of forms and modes, from the georgic and picturesque to the sonnet series and the tour memorial. I will thus trace Wordsworth’s responses between 1808 and 1837 (often, Wordsworth remaining an eighteenth-century thinker at heart, mediated through the category of property), to the epochal shifts in the relations between modes of production, social relations, metabolic regimes, and biophysical constraints that produced our current climate crisis: capitalism’s domination of agriculture, seismic developments in colonial ‘trade,’ and, most importantly, the transition to steam power.

I hold an MA(Hons) in French and English and an MSc in English from the University of Edinburgh, and have been published in Romance, Revolution, and Reform, with a paper forthcoming on Wordsworthian pastoral in contemporary pop music in Lectures du monde anglophone. I am also co-convenor, with Kate Nankervis, of the Eighteenth-Century Ecologies Network, based at CECS.

My research is funded by a Wolfson Foundation Scholarship in the Arts and Humanities.