Funny Feelings in Nature

ABSTRACT Funny Feelings and the Natural World, a panel convened for the joint NASSR/BARS conference at Edge Hill in August 2022, offered new ways of reflecting on the relation between human emotions and the environment. In contrast to the more sublime aesthetic categories and solemn moods that continue to dominate approaches to Romanticism and environmental criticism more broadly, we considered various forms of funny business in Romantic feelings towards the non-human world. This article develops some of the concerns of that panel, by engaging with current ideas in Romantic emotions, affect, and environmental literature. Our readings of John Clare and William Wordsworth suggest that both poets relay experiences of the non-human as funny in various senses and are inspired by the idea that poetic form is itself affective and a model of ecological thinking or feeling. Our enquiry attends to the Romantic period as a time not only when a new appreciation of the environment was emerging, but also different understandings of, and attitudes towards, the ludicrous took hold. ‘Funny’ here operates as it was understood at the time: as a compound of amusement and bemusement, and as a means of considering what the laughable and nature might share.