Christina Rossetti’s Environmental Consciousness takes a cognitive ecocritical approach to Rossetti’s writing as it developed throughout her career. This study provides a unique understanding of Rossetti’s identity as an artist through a cognitive model while also engaging significantly with her spiritual relationship to the nonhuman world. Rossetti was a deliberate and conscious creator who used her writing for therapeutic purposes to create, contemplate, maintain, verify, and, revise her identity. Her understanding of her autobiographical self and her place in the world often comes through observations and poetic treatments of the nonhuman. Rossetti, her speakers, and her characters seek spiritual knowledge in the natural world and share this knowledge with an audience. In nature, Rossetti finds evidence for and guidance from a loving God who offers salvation. Her work places a high value on nature from a Christian perspective that puts conservation over renunciation. She frequently uses strategies that have now been identified by Christian environmentalist such as retrieval, ecojustice, stewardship, and ecological spirituality. With new readings of popular works like "Goblin Market" and "A Birthday," along with treatments of largely neglected works like Verses (1847) and Rossetti’s devotional writings, Christina Rossetti’s Environmental Consciousness offers an understanding of Rossetti’s processes and purposes as a writer and displays new potential for her work in the face of twenty-first-century environmental issues.
Contents
Introduction: Cognitive Ecocriticism and Rossetti
Ecocriticism and the Mind
Rossetti and Psychology
Rossetti and Ecocriticism
Overview
Chapter 1: Self-Creation and Environment
Wayfinding Cognition
The Autobiographical Self and Sociocultural Homeostasis
The Cognitive Model
Chapter 2: Embodied Christian Aesthetics and Environmental Ethics
Agape in Nature
Dark ‘Nature’ and Religious Environmentalism
The Anthropocentricism Debate
Implicit Environmental Ethics
Chapter 3: Gleaning Ruth: Early Poetry
Youthful Strains: Verses (1847)
Being Ellen Alleyn: The Germ
Nameless Rhymester: Blackwood’s Magazine Submissions
Chapter 4: Victorious Jael: First Major Poetry Volumes
Traveling Uphill: Macmillan’s Magazine
Wayfinding Sisters: "Goblin Market"
Seasons of Redemption: Goblin Market and The Prince’s Progress Volumes
Chapter 5: Pious Hannah: Early Devotional Writings
Retrieving Scripture for the Christian Year: Annus Domini
Evangelist Models and Nature’s Mirrors: Called to Be Saints
Creation and Redemption: Seek and Find
Chapter 6: Fruitful Sarah: The Pageant and Other Poems
Time’s Order
The Cognitive Model in Poetry
Sonnets of Earthly and Spiritual Love
Chapter 7: Prophetess Anna: Later Devotional Writings
Nature’s Commandments: Letter and Spirit
Autobiographical Self-Revision: Time Flies
Saints and Animals: Revisions to Time Flies
Apocalyptic Environmentalism: The Face of the Deep
Biography
Todd Owen Williams received his PhD in Literary Criticism and Theory from Kent State University. He is currently an Associate Professor of English at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania where he teaches composition and literature courses including Literature and Psychology and Early World Literature. He has published multiple articles on literary pedagogy, and on Victorian authors including the Rossettis, William Morris, and Oscar Wilde. He is the author of A Therapeutic Approach to Teaching Poetry and a contributor to the volume Teaching Victorian Literature in the Twenty-First Century.
