Book Reviews

BYRON’S NATURE: A ROMANTIC VISION OF CULTURAL ECOLOGY. By J. Andrew

Hubbell. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Pp. x + 289. ISBN 978 3 319 54237 9.
£89.99.
BRITISH ROMANTICISM, CLIMATE CHANGE, AND THE ANTHROPOCENE:
WRITING TAMBORA. By David Higgins. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
Pp. x + 142. ISBN 978 3 319 67893 1. £39.99.

David Higgins and Andrew Hubbell present two timely and compelling ecocritical readings
of Romantic literature. These studies are significant not simply for their useful re-evaluations
of aspects of Romanticism; they are also indicative of a profound shift in ecocritical thinking,
without which such re-evaluations would not have been possible. Both make full use of
new developments in ecocriticism, particularly recent insights into the imbricated nature of
nonhuman and human ecology. These insights have come to us under a variety of now fashion-
able labels: new materialism (on the agency of the material and the extent of its interaction
with the human); speculative realism (which rejects correlationism, that is, the conventional
philosophical emphasis on the correlation between human perception and the thing perceived);
object-oriented ontology (which, similarly, argues for a de-centring of human subjectivity and
a recognition of human and nonhuman entities alike as objects with their own kinds of agency).
All these approaches—identifiable with thinkers such as Donna Haraway, Jane Bennett,
Quentin Meillassoux, and Timothy Morton—radically critique anthropocentrism and show
how what we used to think of as a ‘purely’ human subjectivity is really always a product of
human and nonhuman relations. As ecocritical investigations, both these books are primarily
concerned with the cultural ecology of the material (whether organic or inorganic) and the
discursive (all kinds of communication). In other words, we’ve come a long way from earlier
ecocritical valorisations of local place and dwelling, and mimetic renderings thereof, which
often failed to acknowledge both the role of human perception in idealising a pristine nature
and the unavoidable participation of humans in these seemingly pure, nonhuman ecosystems.
As Hubbell shows, such valorisations also underpin Romantic scholarship, which has tended
to position Wordsworthian nature as one of Romanticism’s core values. On these grounds (via
M.H. Abrams’s natural supernaturalism), Byron has been excluded, only to be later rehabili-
tated (via Jerome McGann’s New Historicism) as the representative of an alternative, cosmo-
politan, and socio-historically oriented brand of Romanticism. Certainly, Hubbell’s careful
historiography of this (which is, of course, more nuanced than my brief synopsis here might

Byron Journal 47.1 (2019)  https://doi.org/10.3828/bj.2019.11

79
Book Reviews

suggest) is one of the strengths of his book. Hubbell shows too how both the Romantic and
ecocritical privileging of Wordsworth’s nature have coalesced, particularly in Jonathan Bate ’s
influential work, effectively screening Byron out of any serious consideration as an ecolog-
ical poet. (Higgins, too, makes the point that the Batesian emphasis on Wordsworthian place
has distracted from the ecological interest, found in the Shelleys and Byron, in environments
hostile to humans.)
The central argument of Hubbell’s book is that Byron’s poetry is only superficially about
the urban, the social, and the resolutely human; rather, argues Hubbell, Byron’s poetry shows
him developing a sense of ‘cultural ecology’, a term Hubbell draws from Murray Bookchin’s
work on social ecology. Byron, argues Hubbell, possessed an ‘ecological understanding of the
metabolic energy flows connecting human society and the nonhuman environment’, flows that
encompassed geopolitics, economics, poetics, as well as the physical (human and nonhuman)
environment. Hubbell delineates the development of this vision from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
to the dramas, Manfred, Cain, and Heaven and Earth, on to Don Juan, alongside an analysis of
Byron’s early travels through Spain, Greece, Malta, and Asia Minor, to his later self-imposed
exile through Switzerland to Italy and, finally, Greece.
Hubbell begins with Childe Harold, dividing his readings between its two halves. He contends
that, despite the seeming disparity between the first and second cantos on the one hand and the
third and fourth on the other, the poem as a whole demonstrates Byron’s nascent interest in
cultural ecology. Cantos I and II are the product of Byron’s immersion, on his first Grand
Tour, in the societies and landscapes of the Levant, in parallel with Alexander von Humboldt
(whose influential work Hubbell assumes Byron had read), who had explored and written about
the ecology and geology of South America by empirical study. Like Humboldt, Byron argues
in his poem for the importance of ecological interconnectedness, here of national culture and
physical environment. It is this, indeed, contends Hubbell, that led to Byron’s vocal support for
the return of the Elgin Marbles to Greece. In the second half of Childe Harold, a despondent
Byron, fleeing scandal and financial ruin in England, is more doubtful about his earlier vision
of cultural ecology, testing out other solutions to social and individual decline, such as a Words-
worthian-inflected nature worship (in Canto III) and a Promethean autopoesis (in Canto IV),
before advocating, by the end of Canto IV, a vision of a revitalised self and a revitalised Europe,
‘propelled by free, open-ended, dynamic, reciprocal relationships’, symbolised by the ocean
and pointing to a renewed commitment to cultural ecology.
Byron wrote Manfred between the two parts of Childe Harold and Cain and Heaven and Earth
in Italy, well after its completion. In a subsequent chapter, Hubbell reads these three closet
dramas together, as meditations on the possibilities for true freedom in a world dominated by
dualist thinking, through three dominant Western myths—that of Faust, flood, and creation.
Manfred’s metaphysical conflicts play out the struggle to reconcile mind and body, ultimately
demonstrating the futility of transcendence as a solution, and thus pointing the way, in
Hubbell’s analysis of the deathbed scene, to ecological thinking. Cain and Heaven and Earth,
meanwhile, set such conflicts in the context of geological time. In the two plays, anti-heroes
Cain and Japhet reject the anti-ecological, hierarchical thinking represented by an Old Testa-
ment God, but, where Cain does so with violence, Japhet is able to follow through with an
ethics of complementarity. Indeed, Hubbell reads Japhet and Anah, so often marginalised in
critical readings of the play, as the drama’s moral centre.
In Don Juan, Byron’s vision of cultural ecology attains its fullest expression. Hubbell focuses
on Cantos VI to XVII, involving Juan’s adventures in the court of Catherine the Great and
80
 Book Reviews

his embassy to Britain. These episodes, Hubbell argues, represent a critique of hierarchical
geopolitical and socio-economic systems. They also advocate an alternative, a precursor of the
concept of panarchy put forward by twentieth-century systems ecologists Lance Gunderson
and C.S. Hollings. Panarchy describes how small-scale systems, such as economic and social
ones, are nested within larger-scale geological and ecological frames, and, consequently, how
conventional dualist thinking disrupts the complex flows between the faster, smaller circuits,
and the slower, large-scale systems. Hubbell’s analysis suggests that the poem’s trenchant criti-
cism of Russia’s militaristic powerplays and Britain’s corrupt and unjust socio-economic system
derives from an investment in something like panarchy. At the same time, the poem posits
a panarchic exuberance in: its energetic, picaresque hero; overflowing, enjambed lines and
feminine rhymes; the sense of unpredictability generated by its ottava rima; and its burlesque,
bathetic juxtapositions of ideas and things.
If Hubbell’s book supplies us with a diachronic understanding of the development of Byron’s
ecological poetics, Higgins’s study describes the wider context synchronically, focusing on the
ecological, geological, social, and cultural events of 1816, the ‘Year without a Summer’, in the
aftermath of the Tambora eruption in what is now Indonesia. Higgins details not just the intel-
lectual activities of the group at the Villa Diodati, but the more immediate textual response
to the Tambora eruption on the one side and the discourses around longer-term effects such
as famine and social unrest in England on the other. Interestingly, Higgins’s discussion of the
Diodati Circle includes a reading of Manfred, that unlike Hubbell’s, sees the play as affirming
the human will to transcendence. Like Hubbell, however, Higgins reads Byron’s work in
general as firmly invested in an understanding of humanity’s place in the physical world as well
as in deep geological time.
Higgins’s concise, readable book (it is the kind of mid-length, fast-speed monograph that
Palgrave Pivot now does so well) rests on the argument that events in and of the nonhuman
environment, even so-called natural disasters, are ultimately rhetorically produced. This is not
to argue, Higgins is at pains to point out, that natural hazards do not actually happen, but it
is to say that their status as catastrophes is the outcome of a network of interacting material
and discursive entities. Following Jane Bennett and Gilles Deleuze, Higgins describes such
a network as an assemblage of human and nonhuman agency. As he puts it, his detailed case
study of Tambora demonstrates ‘the interplay of individual consciousness, political structures,
and earth systems’.
In three chapters, Higgins discusses three smaller networks within the Tambora assemblage.
The first has as its starting points not just the volcanic eruption but the document that aspired
to be a full textual account of that eruption—a 4,500-word treatise that shortly after appeared
in the Transactions of the Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences. The document—co-authored
by, among others, the British governor of Java, Sir Stamford Raffles, and his secretary, Charles
Assey—brought together several disparate eyewitness accounts, underlined the authority of
the British government in managing the disaster and the suffering it occasioned, and thus aimed
at managing both ‘natural’ disaster and ‘native ’ population within an imperially sanctioned
framework. As Higgins shows, Raffles revised the original narrative not once but twice, each
iteration demonstrating a new attempt at containing the seemingly uncontainable eruption,
while meeting rapidly changing geopolitical contexts—the British ceding of Java to the Dutch,
complicated by Napoleon’s escape from Elba in 1815 and the Netherlands’ possible recapitula-
tion to French forces.
The book’s second network is the Diodati Circle, focusing on the literary productions of
81
Book Reviews

the Shelleys and Byron when the unseasonably bad weather of 1816 confined them to the Villa
Diodati. This particular instance of assemblage is defined not just by the collaborative dimen-
sion of all the Diodati writings, itself traceable to Tambora, but by the texts that influenced
them, such as the Comte de Buffon’s global cooling theory and Georges Cuvier’s work on
geology and extinction events. As Higgins shows, ideas about the agency of ice—its power to
disrupt human and nonhuman organisms as well as its effects across deep, geological time—
informs much of the friends’ writings, from Percy Shelley’s ‘Mont Blanc’ to Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein. It evolves, in Byron’s ‘Darkness’, into a fascination with the effects on humans
and nonhumans of global cooling, and thus with a concern with planetary ecology.
In a brief concluding chapter, Higgins supplies a final example—the political aftermath of
famine in the wake of the ‘Year without a Summer’. While reformers such as William Cobbett
spoke and wrote vociferously against what they saw as primarily political failure, Coleridge’s
poem, ‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter’, acknowledges both human and nonhuman agency. The
poem frames the country’s present crisis as the result of a corrupt government unable to amelio-
rate the effects of both the recent wars and the disastrous weather on its people.
These two books are astute analyses of the intricate ties that bind the human and nonhuman,
the material and discursive, and the socio-political and environmental. Both Higgins and
Hubbell demonstrate a gift for cogent, no-nonsense explications of various theoretical positions,
as well as the ability then to bring these into conversation with close textual analysis. Both, too,
are meticulous in their historicist research, and refreshingly clear-eyed about the importance
of historicist scholarship for ecocriticism and vice versa. In both cases, they demonstrate that
our current awareness of just how articulated human and nonhuman lives are (an awareness
brought on, with much discomfiture, by the Anthropocene) has a history. That history shows
both how this awareness has always been with us and how it now takes on a new political and
ethical agency. It is not that Byron and the Shelleys can give us any ready-made lessons about
how to live in the Anthropocene; it is the case that understanding the origins of our ecological
awareness in theirs might help us reflect on what to do with that ecological awareness now.
ADELINE JOHNS-PUTRA
University of Surrey

BYRON: THE POETRY OF POLITICS AND THE POLITICS OF POETRY. Edited by

Roderick Beaton and Christine Kenyon Jones. London and New York: Routledge, 2017. Print.
Pp xxi + 277. ISBN 978 1 4724 5963 3. £120.00.

‘Byron and politics’ might seem on the face of it a straightforward rubric, flagging up a topic
clearly of interest, and important, to all serious students of the poet. Byron was on many
different fronts and in a variety of ways a politically engaged figure: to give just a few examples,
he made speeches in the House of the Lords (albeit only on three occasions), espoused and was
conspicuously associated in his lifetime with many political causes, and ultimately lost his life in
pursuit of one of those causes, that of Greek Independence. Yet when we try to scrutinise more
closely the political dimensions of Byron’s life and works, a seemingly straightforward topic
quickly becomes much more complex, generating a bewildering proliferation of questions and
problems with regard to the scope of the enquiry and the definition of key terms. Firstly, what
counts as ‘politics’ or as politically consequential? Should our focus fall principally on Byron’s
engagement with what one might label the overt, ‘high’ politics of his era, the contestations
82
Reproduced with permission of copyright owner. Further
reproduction prohibited without permission.