{"title":"Reading by Firefly","authors":"Lily Gurton‐Wachter","doi":"10.1353/srm.2023.0007","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay argues that the figure of the firefly sheds light on an environmental poetics that expands our understanding of how literature represented slavery in the Romantic period. Focusing on Edward Rushton's West-Indian Eclogues (1787) and Charlotte Smith's \"To the Fire-fly of Jamaica, seen in a Collection\" (1804), I trace how the firefly exposes the intersection of slavery and natural history, and thwarts the familiar abolitionist impulses to metaphorize, sympathize, and sentimentalize. Flickering on and off, the firefly ultimately registers the failure of a figure to capture and a poetics of intermittence and parataxis that resurfaces in contemporary Black ecopoetry.","PeriodicalId":44848,"journal":{"name":"STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4000,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1353/srm.2023.0007","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"N/A","JCRName":"LITERATURE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Abstract:This essay argues that the figure of the firefly sheds light on an environmental poetics that expands our understanding of how literature represented slavery in the Romantic period. Focusing on Edward Rushton's West-Indian Eclogues (1787) and Charlotte Smith's "To the Fire-fly of Jamaica, seen in a Collection" (1804), I trace how the firefly exposes the intersection of slavery and natural history, and thwarts the familiar abolitionist impulses to metaphorize, sympathize, and sentimentalize. Flickering on and off, the firefly ultimately registers the failure of a figure to capture and a poetics of intermittence and parataxis that resurfaces in contemporary Black ecopoetry.
期刊介绍：
Studies in Romanticism was founded in 1961 by David Bonnell Green at a time when it was still possible to wonder whether "romanticism" was a term worth theorizing (as Morse Peckham deliberated in the first essay of the first number). It seemed that it was, and, ever since, SiR (as it is known to abbreviation) has flourished under a fine succession of editors: Edwin Silverman, W. H. Stevenson, Charles Stone III, Michael Cooke, Morton Palet, and (continuously since 1978) David Wagenknecht. There are other fine journals in which scholars of romanticism feel it necessary to appear - and over the years there are a few important scholars of the period who have not been represented there by important work.
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