“Better Lore” of the Romantic Coast: Maritime Ecologies and Cultural Infrastructure from England, Scotland, and Beyond

Abstract

This essay adapts presentations the authors shared at the Edge Hill NASSR/BARS conference in the Summer of 2022 into a collaboratively constructed discussion. It reflects on what a recent “coastal turn” in ecocriticism, critical geography, and related fields might contribute to Romantic studies, and considers how coastal geographies (real and imagined) have informed aesthetics, politics, and lived experience, especially in settler-colonial contexts. Ranging from seventeenth-century poetry to contemporary fiction, from British waterways to the Mississippi Basin, it strives to bring Romantic accounts of coastal life into conversation with current modes of ecological thought and new forms of theoretical interrogation.