Rigby, K (2016) 'Earth’s poesy: Romantic poetics, natural philosophy, and biosemiotics.' In: Zapf, H, ed. Handbook of ecocriticism and cultural ecology. De Gruyter, Berlin, pp. 45-64. ISBN 9783110308372
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Abstract
This chapter undertakes an exploration of the pre-history of contemporary biosemiotics in Romantic ecopoetics, beginning with the ways in which Romantic natural philosophies, such as those of Schelling and Goethe, opened the way for a renewed appreciation of the subjective ‘worlds’ or Umwelten, as Jakob von Uexküll later termed them, along with the agency, communicative capacity, and, in some cases, ethical considerability of more-than-human beings. Secondly, I will examine the implications of this philosophical re-animation of materiality for the reconceptualization of human language, especially as deployed to poetic ends. Here, I turn to Friedrich Schlegel’s (1967 [1800]) “Conversation on Poetry,” in which human 'poiesis', the crafting of ideational worlds by means of words, is repositioned as an emergent property of the prior 'autopoiesis' of natural becoming. Finally, I will indicate how this German proto-biosemiotics finds a literary counterpart in the ecosemiotics of English Romantic literature, focusing on John Clare’s birds’ nest poetry.
| Item Type: | Book Chapter or Section |
|---|---|
| Note: | Part of the 'Handbooks of English and American Studies' series. |
| Keywords: | biosemiotics, Romanticism, Goethe, Schelling, Clare |
| Divisions: | School of Writing, Publishing and the Humanities |
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| Date Deposited: | 07 Mar 2016 17:32 |
| Last Modified: | 15 Aug 2021 09:42 |
| URI / Page ID: | https://researchspace.bathspa.ac.uk/id/eprint/7403 |
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