Imagining Nature : Blake's Environmental Poetics

In Imagining Nature Kevin Hutchings combines insights garnered from literary history, poststructuralist theory, and the emerging field of ecological literary studies. He considers William Blake's illuminated poetry in the context of the eighteenth-century model of "nature's economy," a conceptual paradigm that prefigured modern-day ecological insights, describing all earthly entities as integrated parts of a dynamic, interactive system. Hutchings details Blake's sympathy for - and important suspicions concerning - the burgeoning contemporary fascination with such things as environmental ethics, animal rights, and the various fields of scientific naturalism.