Panel Chair:
Dra. Teresa Requena (Universitat de Barcelona)
It has long been argued that the pastoral settings in Romanticism constituted a political act. Lance Neuman, for instance, has stated that the American Romantics' return to nature became the means through which they redeemed their fractured Republic from the increasing class distinctions of growing cities under capitalism (xii). Undoubtedly, nature constituted a major battleground onto which the nation's anxieties were expressed. Water in particular became the recurring witness for radical transformations of thought in the nineteenth century. From Thoreau's Walden Pond to Fuller's Great Lakes, water bore testimony to the development of a Romantic thought that flourished as a counter-discourse to mainstream rhetoric.
Suggested topics:
- Water in its different forms -ponds, springs, lakes, rivers, seas, fountains,... - as sites for the development of a new communal or individual awareness that challenged nineteenth-century mainstream thought (Thoreau and Walden Pond, Fuller and the Great Lakes, for instance).
- Water and utopia. Development of political utopianism in connection with water.
- Development of natural therapies (the water cure) as alternatives to traditional drug therapy. Images of health related to water in literature (Whitman's poetry).
- Falls and mills. Development of a working class consciousness by the shores of rivers.
- Ecocriticist perspectives on literary representations of water in U.S. Romanticism.