Imagine you are assembling an introductory lecture on Anglo-American Romanticism for undergraduates. How will you explain Romantic Nature? If the course is a survey, you will likely be limited to commonplaces: unlike their Enlightenment-era forebearers who viewed the natural world in mechanistic terms, the Romantics revered nature as a powerful, sentient force. The Romantic sublime will feature prominently, as will the notion of nature as an escape from civilization. Green Romanticism might make an appearance, too, perhaps with Wordsworth and Thoreau as its avatars. Of course, as any scholar of Romanticism knows, the truth is more complex and therefore difficult to convey. Romanticism is not always green, any more than Romantic Nature is automatically sublime, pristine, or otherwise separate from humans. You know this; but cultural and, in some cases, curricular messages reinforce the simpler narrative, one in which "Nature" is something "over yonder," as Timothy Morton puts it in The Ecological Thought (2010).

Classroom practices are often a lagging indicator of critical trends, in part because canons and the institutionalizing forces that support them are powerful and slow to change. This is one of the motivating insights behind Anya Heise-von der Lippe's Writing Romantic Climate Change, a book that traces the imprint of Romanticism and Romantic studies on contemporary environmental discourse. Writing Romantic Climate Change joins recent studies, such as Kate Rigby's Reclaiming Romanticism: Towards an Ecopoetics of Decolonization (2022) and Seth T. Reno's Early Anthropocene Literature in Britain, 1750-1884 (2020), that update Green Romanticism for an increasingly precarious present. According to Heise-von der Lippe, twentieth-century critics imported Romantic aesthetics into Romantic studies as part of canon formation. They thus "created feedback loops leading to a privileging of the narrative of a universal subject and its mastery of an externalized 'nature' over more diverse, situated positionalities" (253). Green Romanticism then inscribed Romantic ideology into the history of Western environmentalism, a process eventually leading to general acceptance of the Anthropocene paradigm. While scholars are attuned to the problems with Anthropocene discourse, contemporary politics tends to frame climate solutions in the universalizing and simplistic terms. Witness, for example, solar geoengineering schemes that imagine "man" manipulating global temperatures from space.

Might, then, an updated understanding of Romantic nature help us to confront the more problematic aspects of Romanticism's environmentalist legacy? Heise-von der Lippe believes so, although her goal is not simply to replace one flawed narrative of Romantic nature with another. In keeping with a feminist methodology, she argues for Donna J. Haraway's "situated positionalities" as a better way to understand Romanticism and to address climate change in the present. For literary critics, this means paying attention to how writers negotiate gendered expectations surrounding authorship and nature. As Heise-von der Lippe explains, political, cultural, and environmental shifts during the Romantic era complicated "a stable sense of 'man's relationship with 'nature'" (203). The positionality assumed by many canonical Romantic texts--one in which a universalized, implicitly masculine subject contemplates an externalized and feminized natural object--thus begins to seem untenable. For example, in The Last Man, Mary Shelley's narrator Lionel Verney cannot aestheticize the unfolding catastrophe around him from a safe distance. Instead, his vulnerability to an invisible, airborne disease calls attention to the constructedness of a Romantic sublime that is predicated on the viewing subject's separation from nature as well as on his ultimate safety. The novel's multilayered narrative subjectivity amplifies this effect by destabilizing Verney's gender presentation "to an extent that his experience and, consequently, poetic engagement with the sublime is filtered through Othering and, thus, ultimately denied" (200). This is in contrast, Heise-von der Lippe explains, to a text such as Byron's poem "Darkness," in which the masculinized speaker presents the apocalypse as a dream vision, thereby retaining his poetic authority to speak for mankind and nature even after the end of the world.

While an attention to situatedness may be associated with a writer's gender, it does not automatically break down along gendered lines. To cite one example, Henry David Thoreau criticizes what we now see as dire harbingers of the Anthropocene: the acceleration of production and consumption under industrialization; clear cutting and its effects on biodiversity; etc. Yet many ecocritical narratives, not to mention pop-culture memes that conscript Thoreau as a voice of timeless environmentalist wisdom, miss the fact that Thoreau's philosophy "is rooted in a fundamental understanding of the limitations of knowledge as situated in one's own perception and contemplation" (114). Walden does not conjure some proto-Anthropocene; to read Walden as a fable about "man" and "nature" is to read Romantically rather than historically, to impose a masculine universalism that does not fit Thoreau's project. Heise-von der Lippe also cites female writers whose relationship to a universalizing subject position is ambivalent or shifting. This is the case with Joanna Baillie's poem "Address to a Steam-Vessel," which she reads in dialogue with Thoreau's situated stance and William Wordsworth's famous opposition to railway expansion in the Lake District. Heise-von der Lippe's point is not that men wrote about nature in one way and women in another; rather, she urges critics to recognize the extent to which we have tacitly equated a masculinized subject position with the notion of speaking for or about the natural world, thus overlooking diverse Romantic engagements with the environment that often happen to be the result of women's efforts to negotiate Romantic-era gender roles.

Writing Romantic Climate Change is divided into four chapters. The first ("Anthropocene") traces how Romanticism studies came to endorse Romantic ideas about gender, authority, and nature, the result of which was the exclusion of women writers from the canon and, later, from environmental criticism. Noteworthy in this chapter is a reading of Elizabeth Kent's 1823 Flora Domestica, a hybrid text focused on houseplant care that "presents an ethics of care for human and non-human beings from a non-authoritative position of communal learning" (73). Chapter Two ("Steam") focuses on writing about mass transit. Although steam technology emerges only in retrospect as a turning point in climate history, the Romantics recognized the world-altering nature of trains and steamboats. As emblems of progress, trains and steamboats did not only disrupt traditional conceptions of space-time. They also presented novel questions about natural settings that intersected with matters of class, gender, and ability. In an era of profound inequality, steam-powered mass transit presented the "possibility of democratizing travel and, by extension, the aesthetic experiences available through it" (79). Some, such as Wordsworth, mounted elitist arguments against this change, framing increased access to scenic landscapes as an assault on nature. Others, however, such as women travel writers, exploited the new forms of writerly authority made available by high-speed travel, including the classed and implicitly masculine prerogative to observe landscapes from an aestheticized distance. One especially interesting example Heise-von der Lippe invokes in this chapter is that of Dorothy Wordsworth, whose early writing--composed at a time when she could walk and therefore enjoy landscapes in the solitary, contemplative mode prescribed by her brother--is often characterized as Romantic "nature writing." Dorothy's later writing is often dismissed or ignored because of "her limited access to what was perceived as 'nature'" when she required a wheelchair (134). While Dorothy plays a relatively minor role in this chapter, the fate of her reputation is an especially poignant example of Heise-von der Lippe's point that sexism, economic privilege, and ableism shore up other forms of cultural authority, including the power to determine what counts as "literary" and "about nature" in the first place.

Chapter Three ("Apocalypse") considers literary reactions to the climate disruptions brought about by the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora, a cataclysmic event whose imprint on Romantic literary culture has been extensively documented by Gillen D'Arcy Wood (2014) and others. In addition to Byron's "Darkness" and The Last Man, this chapter examines Mary Ann Browne's 1832 "A World Without Water," an apocalyptic poem that Heise-von der Lippe positions as something of a response to "Darkness." Whereas Byron's poem observes the end of the world from a disembodied distance and envisions violent individualism as humans' response to scarcity, Browne's speaker enters the scenes she describes, "foreground[ing] humanity, community and compassion as values that might prevail even in the face of climate catastrophe" (168). Like The Last Man, Browne's poem negotiates a plurality of perspectives on nature--and, importantly, insists upon situatedness and embodiment as prerequisites for aesthetic experience.

In a bold move, the book's final chapter ("Mushrooms") turns to the present day to examine the recent vogue in popular nonfiction about mushrooms, such as Merlin Sheldrake's Entangled Life (2020). For the Romantics, mushrooms were a confusing organism whose mysteriousness meant that a variety of narratives could be mapped onto them. This remains true in the present day, when TED talks, books, and other media cast mushrooms as potential "saviors" of a damaged planet, capable of everything from breaking down formidable pollutants to fostering world peace as hallucinogens. Heise-von der Lippe notes a "mycological turn" in the humanities as well: for scholars, as for popular writers, mushrooms have become powerful emblems of biological entanglement, organisms that shift our perspective on agency, time, and geography. Whereas pop narratives direct this potential toward shoring up masculinized narratives of progress, however, scholars hope that mushrooms might model more radical habits of mind. Heise-von der Lippe invokes Anna Tsing's Mushroom at the End of the World (2015) as an example of how mushrooms can inspire productive explorations of positionality. She also offers brief readings of short fiction by Ursula Le Guin and essays by Aliya Whiteley that incorporate the notion of mycelial network consciousness.

Writing Romantic Climate Change covers quite a lot of conceptual ground, in part by sticking to relatively condensed accounts of the scholarly literature. One strength of this book is its patient close reading of its primary texts. Whether these texts are literary or nonliterary, Heise-von der Lippe pays meticulous attention to their subtleties of form. For instance, her analysis of "Darkness" deals with elements of prosody, such as rhyme and the placement of caesuras, that are often treated as incidental to the apocalyptic theme. The tradeoff is that Writing Romantic Climate Change focuses on a relatively small number of primary texts in total. Some readers may find this limited archive disappointing, especially given the ambitious claims about the Romantic era, Romantic ecocriticism, and our Anthropocene present. That said, it makes sense for a book that advocates for situated perspectives to situate thoroughly the artworks it does feature, even at the expense of breadth. Further, comprehensiveness is not the point of Heise-von der Lippe's method, even as she provides sufficient evidence that it can be applied more widely: when it comes to addressing climate change, situated knowledges in all of their particularities "provid[e] a basis for [the] differentiated and localized mitigation strategies" that we must cultivate alongside more comprehensive measures (258).

An unavoidable question looming over Writing Romantic Climate Change, and indeed all ecocriticism, is whether inaction on climate change amounts to an ideological problem that, once exposed, will give way to ethical action. A skeptical reader might ask: How much do lingering Romantic attitudes toward "man" and "nature" really explain the mess we're in here? To be fair, Heise von-der Lippe makes no claim to solutions. Instead, she offers Tsing's and Whiteley's work as modest examples of what productive ways of thinking about nature can look like. Furthermore, she warns against developing "feedback loops" within our scholarly communities: interrogating orthodoxies is always a valuable feminist project, and one that eventually can alter the classroom scenario I invoked at the beginning of this review. In this and other ways, Heise-von der Lippe leaves ample pathways for other teacher-scholars to follow. Hopefully, many will, especially thinkers interested in how queer, Black, Indigenous, and other historically marginalized identities intersect with environmentalism. If the end result is a richer, more diverse narrative about humans' entanglements with the more-than-human world, then that alone is a win--for, as Heise-von der Lippe concludes, "a better understanding of the narrative might help in changing it after all" (259).

Lisa Ottum is Professor of English at Xavier University.