Papers by Kevin Hutchings
English Studies in Canada, 1997
Ah done been in sorrow's kitchen and Ah done licked out all de pots. ... Nothin' kin touch mall s... more Ah done been in sorrow's kitchen and Ah done licked out all de pots. ... Nothin' kin touch mall soul no m o' ." Lucy Potts/Pearson (Hurston, Jonah's Gourd Vine 131) "Ah done been tuh de horizon and back and now Ah kin set heah in mah house and live by comparisons." Janie Crawford/Killicks/Starks/W oods (Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God 182)
McGill-Queen's University Press eBooks, May 1, 2013
European Romantic Review, 1997
Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2002
... William Blake, The Four Zoas Superficially, pastoral poetry, in its pleasant myth of rural pl... more ... William Blake, The Four Zoas Superficially, pastoral poetry, in its pleasant myth of rural pleni-tude, seems highly to value the green world of nature; but, as Donald Worster has argued, a strong case can be made for the antithetical view. ...
Romantic Ecologies and Colonial Cultures in the British Atlantic World, 1770-1850
Kevin Hutchings's project for Romantic Ecologies and Colonial Cultures in the British-Atlantic Wo... more Kevin Hutchings's project for Romantic Ecologies and Colonial Cultures in the British-Atlantic World is to "open up a dialogue between (post) colonial and ecocritical approaches to Romantic scholarship" (14). After a brief survey of ecocritical writing about Romanticism, which highlights the "political problems" (10) infesting various attempts to write about or indeed distinguish something sometimes called nature, he notes approvingly the recent development of "a sort of critical double-vision" in ecocriticism, concerned "to understand the materiality of nature, on the one hand, and the politics of nature's representation, on the other" (11). This is good because "an insistent awareness of the history of nature's conceptual politics promotes a necessary critical vigilance that can help to prevent an unwitting reinscription of various modes of tyranny" (11). Thus may one avoid "violent reactionary thought" (12) of the kind, for example, that once or might still characterize some beings or behaviours as "natural" and some not and that certainly might still vitiate our understanding of transatlantic (post)colonial relationships.
about whether Newgate novels are moral or not, nor do they wonder where Gwendolen Harleth’s fate ... more about whether Newgate novels are moral or not, nor do they wonder where Gwendolen Harleth’s fate sits in the vast scale of human happiness, nor do they think there’s anything natural or allegedly right about the typical Bildungsroman plot (at least, not when sophisticated readers switch on their interpretive faculties). I am not even sure how many Victorians responded to novels in these ways (although Rosenthal demonstrates clearly that many of them did). Rosenthal, nevertheless, is correct that critics and theorists have been more reliant on intuitionist models than they recognize, and he has done us a great service by making those dynamics visible. I would simply argue that the critical pendulum in ethical studies does not have to swing as far back toward a descriptive formalism as it does in Rosenthal’s work. Victorianists will debate Good Form because it is so deeply engaging, and because it constitutes such a powerful corrective and supplement to the ways in which literary scholars have approached ethical questions. It has a great deal to teach us, and even those who dispute its most general claims will find it transformative, ethically or otherwise. John Kucich Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
European Romantic Review, 2016
This article investigates the Romantic-era origins of Canada's residential school system, which r... more This article investigates the Romantic-era origins of Canada's residential school system, which removed Aboriginal children from their homes in an official effort to sever familial and cultural ties and indoctrinate them into the hegemonic Euro-Canadian cultural order. The subject of a groundbreaking report recently published by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, this education system was not formally instituted until 1879; hence, most of its scholarship focuses on Canada's post-Confederation period. This article attempts to expand our understanding of the residential school system by tracing its formal ideological foundations back to the 1820s when Upper Canada's lieutenant governor, Sir Peregrine Maitland, and his chief adviser, the prominent Anglican cleric, educator, and amateur poet John Strachanboth of whom maintained strong transatlantic ties-first recommended Aboriginal children's participation in immersive forms of colonial pedagogy. To contextualize this discussion, the article also examines key writings by the Irish-Ojibwe poet Bemwewegiizhigokwe (Jane Johnston Schoolcraft), who in 1839 lamented her children's enrollment in American boarding schools, becoming one of the first Aboriginal writers to reveal the adverse effects of such pedagogy on Native American children and their families.
A Global History of Literature and the Environment
Romanticism and Pleasure, 2010
With a few notable exceptions, modern-day scholars have agreed that William Blake was an anti-emp... more With a few notable exceptions, modern-day scholars have agreed that William Blake was an anti-empiricist who rejected the material world of nature in favor of spiritualized abstractions like “imagination” and “eternity.” But this implicitly dualistic reading of the Blakean universe is difficult to reconcile with the poet’s celebrated tendency to denounce oppositional models of the relationship between body and soul. Moreover, it does not adequately account for Blake’s exuberant celebration of the naked human form in its pursuit of sensual pleasure and “The lineaments of Gratified Desire.” The very idea that Blake regarded the physical world of nature as “no more than the Mundane Shell or Vegetative Universe that was the vesture of Satan” (Ackroyd 328) raises some serious questions. How could Blake celebrate human sensual experience while at the same time denouncing the material contexts in which sensuality is expressed and explored? If the body is indeed a “portion of Soul,” as Blake claims in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (4; E34), then its pleasure-seeking physical impulses presumably have a spiritual basis. When in The Four Zoas Blake asks “where are human feet for Lo our eyes are in the heavens” (FZ Night 9, 122.25; E391), his question gestures toward the potential perils of a dualistic distinction between spirit and materiality, which threatens to devalue and even lose sight of the body and its environment, the physical Earth upon which the body stands.
Contents: Introduction: mobilizing gender, race, and nation, Kevin Hutchings and Julia M. Wright ... more Contents: Introduction: mobilizing gender, race, and nation, Kevin Hutchings and Julia M. Wright Part 1 Transatlantic Mobility: Gender and Sexuality: Charlotte Smith and the spectre of America, Jared Richman Romantic aesthetics, gender, and transatlantic travel in Anna Brownwell Jameson's Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada, Charity Matthews Felicia Hemans, Herman Melville and the queer Atlantic, Daniel Hannah. Part 2 Reconfiguring Race: Prophets of resistance: Native American shamans and anglophone writers, Tim Fulford Frederick Douglass and transatlantic echoes of 'the color line', Bridget Bennett Pirates and patriots: citizenship, race and the transatlantic adventure novel, Sarah H. Ficke. Part 3 Cultural Exchanges: Print, Tourism, and Politics: Charles Brockden Brown and England: of genres, the Minerva Press, and the early republican reprint trade, Eve Tavor Bannet Romantic Niagara: environmental aesthetics, indigenous culture, and transatlantic tourism, 1794a "1850, Kevin Hutchings Beyond the American empire: Charles Brockden Brown and the making of a new global economic order, Wil Verhoeven Bibliography Index.
Romanticism on the Net, 2007
Wordsworth Circle, Sep 22, 2012
Because politics is a distinctly human activity, we often think of nature as something that exist... more Because politics is a distinctly human activity, we often think of nature as something that exists apart from the political realm. However, in an era of revolutionary turmoil, William Blake, who championed “England’s green and pleasant land” against industrialism’s “dark Satanic Mills,” understood better than any other Romantic poet that nature was subject to myriad political uses. By showing how cultural institutions invoke nature to “naturalize” their authority, Blake reveals that nature can be thoroughly political. Join author and musician Kevin Hutchings as he explores the politics of Blake’s visionary ecology in poetry, painting, and song
because politics is a distinctly human activity, we often think of nature as something that exist... more because politics is a distinctly human activity, we often think of nature as something that exists apart from the political realm. However, in an era of revolutionary turmoil, William blake, who championed "england's green and pleasant land" against industrialism's "dark Satanic Mills," understood better than any other romantic poet that nature was subject to myriad political uses. by showing how cultural institutions invoke nature to "naturalize" their authority, blake reveals that nature can be thoroughly political. Join author and musician Kevin Hutchings as he explores the politics of blake's visionary ecology in poetry, painting, and song.
Ariel a Review of International English Literature, Apr 1, 1997
KEVIN D. HUTCHINGS ... though it is not to be supposed that the compiler of a general work can be... more KEVIN D. HUTCHINGS ... though it is not to be supposed that the compiler of a general work can be intimately acquainted with every subject of which it may be necessary to treat, yet a very moderate share of understanding is surely sufficient to guard him against giving credit to. .. marvellous tales, however smoothly they may be told, or however boldly they may be asserted, by the romancing traveller.
Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net:, 2008
Literature Compass, 2008
Because environmental issues are nowadays attracting unprecedented levels of public attention and... more Because environmental issues are nowadays attracting unprecedented levels of public attention and concern, an ecocritical approach to the study of Romantic literature has the potential to inspire and energize the teaching and learning process. By examining the integral role that Romantic-era thought has played-and continues to play-in the history of ecological science, conservation, environmental ethics, and animal studies, readers gain an enhanced appreciation of Romanticism's modernity and of the continuing relevance of Romanticism's legacy in the present-day world.
Teaching Ecocriticism and Green Cultural Studies
Since the publication of Jonathan Bate’s Romantic Ecology in 1991, scholars have increasingly sou... more Since the publication of Jonathan Bate’s Romantic Ecology in 1991, scholars have increasingly sought to reframe British Romanticism in light of environmental history, creating in the process the field of inquiry known as ‘Green Romanticism’ or ‘Romantic Ecology’. Exploring trends in this field,1 I have developed an undergraduate seminar at the University of Northern British Columbia that encourages students to consider, from an ecocritical perspective, Romanticera responses to such topics as Enlightenment science and natural history, urbanisation and industrialisation, conservation, environmental ethics and animal welfare. During our 13-week semester, the class addresses a number of overarching questions: does Romanticism provide an ethical alternative to traditional anthropocentric concepts of nature, or is the literature’s emphasis upon imagination itself thoroughly human-centred? How do the Romantics’ generic experiments inform their responses to nature? What are the environmental implications of aesthetic categories like the sublime, the beautiful and the picturesque? How do Romantic concepts of nature engage with hegemonic models of gender, race and class? By asking such questions, I aim to help my students appreciate Romanticism’s contributions to environmental history and to understand some of the ways in which Romantic thought continues to inform modern-day environmentalist theory and practice.
Romanticism, 2004
I. GENERIC CONTEXTS In Thomas Campbell’s short poem ‘The Last Man’ (1823), published three years ... more I. GENERIC CONTEXTS In Thomas Campbell’s short poem ‘The Last Man’ (1823), published three years before Mary Shelley’s novel of the same title, we witness a significant conjunction of Christian prophecy and millenarian pastoral. Selfrighteously defiant in the face of his own impending demise, Campbell’s narrator-protagonist stands ‘prophet-like’, the last remaining human witness of the earthly apocalypse. According to a contemporary reviewer, Campbell’s Last Man behaves in a manner entirely worthy of respect and emulation, embodying indeed the very ‘spirit of religion’. To a certain extent, the poem was understood to merit such praise because, following orthodoxy, it situates a restored Edenic pastoral not on the materially corrupt Earth but in a spiritually redeemed millennium or heavenly afterlife. As Campbell’s narrator piously explains,
Romanticism, 2012
I: Introduction When British writer Anna Jameson (1794–1860; figure 1) arrived in Toronto in 1836... more I: Introduction When British writer Anna Jameson (1794–1860; figure 1) arrived in Toronto in 1836, she found herself in the thick of local society, for her husband, Robert Jameson, was Upper Canada’s attorney general. It is not surprising, then, that Mrs. Jameson quickly became acquainted with the British colony’s elite members, including fellow author Sir Francis Bond Head (1793–1875; figure 2), the recently appointed lieutenant governor. Readers of Jameson’s travelogue Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (1838) will already be familiar with her passing references to Sir Francis, including her incisive critique of his paternalistic approach to indigenous governance policy. This essay revisits Jameson’s critique in light of a letter we recently discovered in the John Murray Archive at the National Library of Scotland. The letter, which Head wrote to his friend and publisher, John Murray, contains a rather scandalous allegation, for in it he accuses Jameson of stealing a skull from an indigenous gravesite – a circumstance that, if true, would complicate her avowed sympathy for North America’s First Peoples. In this essay we evaluate Head’s case against Jameson, weighing its plausibility and considering its implications. In the process, we hope to shed new light on the relationship between British Romanticism, colonialism, and contemporary ideas of indigenous culture and governance. Because Jameson and Head are minor authors, a few introductory words are in order before we proceed to our main argument. Although, as we demonstrate below, each was highly critical of the other, they shared a number of things in common, including a respectable level of popularity as travel writers. Before coming to Upper Canada, Jameson had penned such popular travelogues as The Diary of an Ennuyee (1826) and Visits and Sketches at Home and Abroad (1834), while Head had earned a degree of celebrity for his Rough Notes Taken During Some Rapid Journeys Across the Pampas and Among the Andes (1826) and Bubbles from the Brunnens of Nassau (1834). Having been born in the early years of the British Romantic period, both authors shared a penchant for nature and the picturesque, and each admired particular Romantic authors (for example, Jameson was an enthusiastic reader of Wordsworth, and Head enjoyed the poetry of Byron and Scott).
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Papers by Kevin Hutchings