Seth Reno is Distinguished Research Associate Professor in the Department of English and Philosophy at Auburn University Montgomery, where he specializes in British Romanticism, ecocriticism, affect theory, climate fiction, and the environmental humanities. He hails from Ohio, where he received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from The Ohio State University. Before joining AUM in 2013, Seth taught at Wittenberg University and Ohio State. He has published two monographs, two edited collections, and over a dozen journal articles and book chapters on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, art, and science. His third edited collection is under contract and forthcoming in 2021. In addition to literature, Seth has a passion for food and travel: he love cooking, he teaches courses on food and culture, he has undertaken several international research trips and study abroad courses, and he once came in fourth place at a burger-eating competition (he has since given up his professional food-eating aspirations).
This volume presents new work by scholars working at the intersection of British Romanticism and ... more This volume presents new work by scholars working at the intersection of British Romanticism and affect studies. Each essay takes a different approach to affect and emotion, from a piece on Joanna Baillie’s passion plays, co-written by a literary scholar and a cognitive psychologist, to a piece that utilizes affect theory and rhythmic studies in a reading of William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. This volume does not propose a single definition of “affect,” but all of the essays share the conviction that the kind of interdisciplinary work demanded by affect studies is beneficial to both Romantic studies and affect studies. Much more than a passing trend, affect studies has transformed the study of emotion for a generation of scholars.
This essay outlines the approach, rationale, construction, management, and results of a digital a... more This essay outlines the approach, rationale, construction, management, and results of a digital annotated poem project assigned in an upper-level course on “Green Romanticism,” which I designed and taught during Spring 2015. Students in this class created a website devoted to a particular author and text using Weebly website creator. In this essay, I include narratives of some of the best projects (including links to students’ sites), as well as reflections on the assignment’s constraints and affordances. In doing so, I urge teachers of Romanticism to adopt digital research projects as alternatives and complements to traditional research papers, especially in interdisciplinary programs and at schools where students’ career goals do not include academia.
This essay argues for the benefits of assigning a website project in college writing courses focu... more This essay argues for the benefits of assigning a website project in college writing courses focused on ecocriticism and environmental issues. While many scholars have urged teachers to move away from digital media and technology in favor of hands-on, place-based education, this essay demonstrates how a digital assignment can enhance students’ engagement with contemporary environmental discourses and the material world in which they live. If we want our students to develop a love of nature and an understanding of the interconnectedness and interdependence of all things on the planet, we must do so in ways that get them to think outside of the classroom, to see their work as part of broader social discourses, and to develop the kinds of interdisciplinary approaches demanded by ecocriticism. The website project discussed in this essay does all of these things. The first part of the essay outlines the pedagogical and philosophical rationale for the digital project. The second part provides a detailed overview of the assignment prompt and a discussion of specific students’ websites, which were created for a first-year writing course at Auburn University Montgomery.
Wordsworth consistently turns to love at crucial moments in his poetry and prose, yet it does not... more Wordsworth consistently turns to love at crucial moments in his poetry and prose, yet it does not get the scholarly attention of nature, imagination, history, and ideology. This essay analyzes Wordsworthian love from its initial appearances in An Evening Walk and Salisbury Plain to its fuller development in “Tintern Abbey.” What begins in 1788 as a means to re-envision the relationships between individuals and between humans and the natural world becomes by 1798 Wordsworth's central poetic and philosophic concept, an idea of love that weaves itself through nearly every aspect of his poetry and poetics. Although there are instances where Wordsworth turns to sentimentalism, self-love, or the so-called egotistical sublime, this essay demonstrates how love works in the poetry; how it develops scholarship that portrays Wordsworth as escapist, evasive, and deluded by the Romantic Ideology; and how it reveals a fuller understanding of Wordsworth's work and the Romantic theory of love.
Perhaps no concept has become dominant in so many fields as rapidly as the Anthropocene. Meaning ... more Perhaps no concept has become dominant in so many fields as rapidly as the Anthropocene. Meaning "The Age of Humans," the Anthropocene is the proposed name for our current geological epoch, beginning when human activities started to have a noticeable impact on Earth’s geology and ecosystems. Long embraced by the natural sciences, the Anthropocene has now become commonplace in the humanities and social sciences, where it has taken firm enough hold to engender a thoroughgoing assessment and critique. Why and how has the geological concept of the Anthropocene become important to the humanities? What new approaches and insights do the humanities offer? What narratives and critiques of the Anthropocene do the humanities produce? What does it mean to study literature of the Anthropocene? These are the central questions that this collection explores. Each chapter takes a decidedly different humanist approach to the Anthropocene, from environmental humanities to queer theory to race, illuminating the important contributions of the humanities to the myriad discourses on the Anthropocene. This volume is designed to provide concise overviews of particular approaches and texts, as well as compelling and original interventions in the study of the Anthropocene. Written in an accessible style free from disciplinary-specific jargon, many chapters focus on well-known authors and texts, making this collection especially useful to teachers developing a course on the Anthropocene and students undertaking introductory research. This collection provides truly innovative arguments regarding how and why the Anthropocene concept is important to literature and the humanities.
This book questions when exactly the Anthropocene began, uncovering an “early Anthropocene” in th... more This book questions when exactly the Anthropocene began, uncovering an “early Anthropocene” in the literature, art, and science of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. In chapters organized around the classical elements of Earth, Fire, Water, and Air, Seth Reno shows how literary writers of the Industrial Era borrowed from scientists to capture the changes they witnessed to weather, climate, and other systems. Poets linked the hellish flames of industrial furnaces to the magnificent, geophysical force of volcanic explosions. Novelists and painters depicted cloud formations and polluted urban atmospheres as part of the emerging discipline of climate science. In so doing, the subjects of Reno’s study—some famous, some more obscure—gave form to a growing sense of humans as geophysical agents, capable of reshaping Earth itself. Situated at the interaction of literary studies, environmental studies, and science studies, Early Anthropocene Literature in Britain tells the story of how writers heralded, and wrestled with, Britain’s role in sparking the now-familiar “epoch of humans.”
Situated at the intersection of affect studies, ecocriticism, aesthetics, and Romantic studies, t... more Situated at the intersection of affect studies, ecocriticism, aesthetics, and Romantic studies, this book presents a genealogy of love in Romantic-era poetry, science, and philosophy. While feeling and emotion have been traditional mainstays of Romantic literature, the concept of love is under-studied and under-appreciated, often neglected or dismissed as idealized, illusory, or overly sentimental. However, Seth Reno shows that a particular conception of intellectual love is interwoven with the major literary, scientific, and philosophical discourses of the period. Romantic-era writers conceived of love as integral to broader debates about the nature of life, the biology of the human body, the sociology of human relationships, the philosophy of nature, and the disclosure of being.
Amorous Aesthetics traces the development of intellectual love from its first major expression in Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics, through its adoption and adaptation in eighteenth-century moral and natural philosophy, to its emergence as a Romantic tradition in the work of six major poets. From William Wordsworth and John Clare’s love of nature, to Percy Shelley’s radical politics of love, to the more sceptical stances of Felicia Hemans, Alfred Tennyson, and Matthew Arnold, intellectual love is a pillar of Romanticism.
This book will interest scholars and students of Romanticism, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature, affect studies, ecocriticism, aesthetics, and those who work at the intersection of literature and science.
This volume presents new work by scholars working at the intersection of British Romanticism and ... more This volume presents new work by scholars working at the intersection of British Romanticism and affect studies. Each essay takes a different approach to affect and emotion, from a piece on Joanna Baillie’s passion plays, co-written by a literary scholar and a cognitive psychologist, to a piece that utilizes affect theory and rhythmic studies in a reading of William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. This volume does not propose a single definition of “affect,” but all of the essays share the conviction that the kind of interdisciplinary work demanded by affect studies is beneficial to both Romantic studies and affect studies. Much more than a passing trend, affect studies has transformed the study of emotion for a generation of scholars.
Situated at the intersection of ecocriticism, affect studies, and Romantic studies, this collecti... more Situated at the intersection of ecocriticism, affect studies, and Romantic studies, this collection breaks new ground on the role of emotions in Western environmentalism. Recent scholarship highlights how traffic between Romantic-era literature and science helped to catalyze Green Romanticism. Closer to our own moment, the affective turn reflects similar cross-disciplinary collaboration, as many scholars now see the physiological phenomenon of affect as a force central to how we develop conscious attitudes and commitments. Together, these trends offer suggestive insights for the study of Green Romanticism.
This volume presents new work by scholars working at the intersection of British Romanticism and ... more This volume presents new work by scholars working at the intersection of British Romanticism and affect studies. Each essay takes a different approach to affect and emotion, from a piece on Joanna Baillie’s passion plays, co-written by a literary scholar and a cognitive psychologist, to a piece that utilizes affect theory and rhythmic studies in a reading of William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. This volume does not propose a single definition of “affect,” but all of the essays share the conviction that the kind of interdisciplinary work demanded by affect studies is beneficial to both Romantic studies and affect studies. Much more than a passing trend, affect studies has transformed the study of emotion for a generation of scholars.
This essay outlines the approach, rationale, construction, management, and results of a digital a... more This essay outlines the approach, rationale, construction, management, and results of a digital annotated poem project assigned in an upper-level course on “Green Romanticism,” which I designed and taught during Spring 2015. Students in this class created a website devoted to a particular author and text using Weebly website creator. In this essay, I include narratives of some of the best projects (including links to students’ sites), as well as reflections on the assignment’s constraints and affordances. In doing so, I urge teachers of Romanticism to adopt digital research projects as alternatives and complements to traditional research papers, especially in interdisciplinary programs and at schools where students’ career goals do not include academia.
This essay argues for the benefits of assigning a website project in college writing courses focu... more This essay argues for the benefits of assigning a website project in college writing courses focused on ecocriticism and environmental issues. While many scholars have urged teachers to move away from digital media and technology in favor of hands-on, place-based education, this essay demonstrates how a digital assignment can enhance students’ engagement with contemporary environmental discourses and the material world in which they live. If we want our students to develop a love of nature and an understanding of the interconnectedness and interdependence of all things on the planet, we must do so in ways that get them to think outside of the classroom, to see their work as part of broader social discourses, and to develop the kinds of interdisciplinary approaches demanded by ecocriticism. The website project discussed in this essay does all of these things. The first part of the essay outlines the pedagogical and philosophical rationale for the digital project. The second part provides a detailed overview of the assignment prompt and a discussion of specific students’ websites, which were created for a first-year writing course at Auburn University Montgomery.
Wordsworth consistently turns to love at crucial moments in his poetry and prose, yet it does not... more Wordsworth consistently turns to love at crucial moments in his poetry and prose, yet it does not get the scholarly attention of nature, imagination, history, and ideology. This essay analyzes Wordsworthian love from its initial appearances in An Evening Walk and Salisbury Plain to its fuller development in “Tintern Abbey.” What begins in 1788 as a means to re-envision the relationships between individuals and between humans and the natural world becomes by 1798 Wordsworth's central poetic and philosophic concept, an idea of love that weaves itself through nearly every aspect of his poetry and poetics. Although there are instances where Wordsworth turns to sentimentalism, self-love, or the so-called egotistical sublime, this essay demonstrates how love works in the poetry; how it develops scholarship that portrays Wordsworth as escapist, evasive, and deluded by the Romantic Ideology; and how it reveals a fuller understanding of Wordsworth's work and the Romantic theory of love.
Perhaps no concept has become dominant in so many fields as rapidly as the Anthropocene. Meaning ... more Perhaps no concept has become dominant in so many fields as rapidly as the Anthropocene. Meaning "The Age of Humans," the Anthropocene is the proposed name for our current geological epoch, beginning when human activities started to have a noticeable impact on Earth’s geology and ecosystems. Long embraced by the natural sciences, the Anthropocene has now become commonplace in the humanities and social sciences, where it has taken firm enough hold to engender a thoroughgoing assessment and critique. Why and how has the geological concept of the Anthropocene become important to the humanities? What new approaches and insights do the humanities offer? What narratives and critiques of the Anthropocene do the humanities produce? What does it mean to study literature of the Anthropocene? These are the central questions that this collection explores. Each chapter takes a decidedly different humanist approach to the Anthropocene, from environmental humanities to queer theory to race, illuminating the important contributions of the humanities to the myriad discourses on the Anthropocene. This volume is designed to provide concise overviews of particular approaches and texts, as well as compelling and original interventions in the study of the Anthropocene. Written in an accessible style free from disciplinary-specific jargon, many chapters focus on well-known authors and texts, making this collection especially useful to teachers developing a course on the Anthropocene and students undertaking introductory research. This collection provides truly innovative arguments regarding how and why the Anthropocene concept is important to literature and the humanities.
This book questions when exactly the Anthropocene began, uncovering an “early Anthropocene” in th... more This book questions when exactly the Anthropocene began, uncovering an “early Anthropocene” in the literature, art, and science of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. In chapters organized around the classical elements of Earth, Fire, Water, and Air, Seth Reno shows how literary writers of the Industrial Era borrowed from scientists to capture the changes they witnessed to weather, climate, and other systems. Poets linked the hellish flames of industrial furnaces to the magnificent, geophysical force of volcanic explosions. Novelists and painters depicted cloud formations and polluted urban atmospheres as part of the emerging discipline of climate science. In so doing, the subjects of Reno’s study—some famous, some more obscure—gave form to a growing sense of humans as geophysical agents, capable of reshaping Earth itself. Situated at the interaction of literary studies, environmental studies, and science studies, Early Anthropocene Literature in Britain tells the story of how writers heralded, and wrestled with, Britain’s role in sparking the now-familiar “epoch of humans.”
Situated at the intersection of affect studies, ecocriticism, aesthetics, and Romantic studies, t... more Situated at the intersection of affect studies, ecocriticism, aesthetics, and Romantic studies, this book presents a genealogy of love in Romantic-era poetry, science, and philosophy. While feeling and emotion have been traditional mainstays of Romantic literature, the concept of love is under-studied and under-appreciated, often neglected or dismissed as idealized, illusory, or overly sentimental. However, Seth Reno shows that a particular conception of intellectual love is interwoven with the major literary, scientific, and philosophical discourses of the period. Romantic-era writers conceived of love as integral to broader debates about the nature of life, the biology of the human body, the sociology of human relationships, the philosophy of nature, and the disclosure of being.
Amorous Aesthetics traces the development of intellectual love from its first major expression in Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics, through its adoption and adaptation in eighteenth-century moral and natural philosophy, to its emergence as a Romantic tradition in the work of six major poets. From William Wordsworth and John Clare’s love of nature, to Percy Shelley’s radical politics of love, to the more sceptical stances of Felicia Hemans, Alfred Tennyson, and Matthew Arnold, intellectual love is a pillar of Romanticism.
This book will interest scholars and students of Romanticism, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature, affect studies, ecocriticism, aesthetics, and those who work at the intersection of literature and science.
This volume presents new work by scholars working at the intersection of British Romanticism and ... more This volume presents new work by scholars working at the intersection of British Romanticism and affect studies. Each essay takes a different approach to affect and emotion, from a piece on Joanna Baillie’s passion plays, co-written by a literary scholar and a cognitive psychologist, to a piece that utilizes affect theory and rhythmic studies in a reading of William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. This volume does not propose a single definition of “affect,” but all of the essays share the conviction that the kind of interdisciplinary work demanded by affect studies is beneficial to both Romantic studies and affect studies. Much more than a passing trend, affect studies has transformed the study of emotion for a generation of scholars.
Situated at the intersection of ecocriticism, affect studies, and Romantic studies, this collecti... more Situated at the intersection of ecocriticism, affect studies, and Romantic studies, this collection breaks new ground on the role of emotions in Western environmentalism. Recent scholarship highlights how traffic between Romantic-era literature and science helped to catalyze Green Romanticism. Closer to our own moment, the affective turn reflects similar cross-disciplinary collaboration, as many scholars now see the physiological phenomenon of affect as a force central to how we develop conscious attitudes and commitments. Together, these trends offer suggestive insights for the study of Green Romanticism.
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Amorous Aesthetics traces the development of intellectual love from its first major expression in Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics, through its adoption and adaptation in eighteenth-century moral and natural philosophy, to its emergence as a Romantic tradition in the work of six major poets. From William Wordsworth and John Clare’s love of nature, to Percy Shelley’s radical politics of love, to the more sceptical stances of Felicia Hemans, Alfred Tennyson, and Matthew Arnold, intellectual love is a pillar of Romanticism.
This book will interest scholars and students of Romanticism, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature, affect studies, ecocriticism, aesthetics, and those who work at the intersection of literature and science.
Amorous Aesthetics traces the development of intellectual love from its first major expression in Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics, through its adoption and adaptation in eighteenth-century moral and natural philosophy, to its emergence as a Romantic tradition in the work of six major poets. From William Wordsworth and John Clare’s love of nature, to Percy Shelley’s radical politics of love, to the more sceptical stances of Felicia Hemans, Alfred Tennyson, and Matthew Arnold, intellectual love is a pillar of Romanticism.
This book will interest scholars and students of Romanticism, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature, affect studies, ecocriticism, aesthetics, and those who work at the intersection of literature and science.