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Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment Advance Access originally published online on July 28, 2009
Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 2009 16(3):443-468; doi:10.1093/isle/isp063
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© The Author(s) 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

"This Most Beautiful and Adorn'd World": Nicolson's Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory Reconsidered

Janice Hewlett Koelb

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Next to indecency of expression comes meanness, [...] when the grandeur or dignity of anything is diminished by the words used, as in the line: ‘There is a rocky wart upon the mountain's brow.’

—Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, bk. 8.3.48–50.

Marjorie Hope Nicolson's 1959 Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory, reprinted for a new audience in 1997 and reintroduced by William Cronon as a classic text in ecocriticism (vii–viii), still has many lessons, both positive and negative, to offer ecological literary critics. After nearly half a century, the positive lessons have already been thoroughly assimilated into the current critical discourse, but those negative lessons still await serious consideration. Certainly scholars have already taken to heart the notion that a "green" criticism—one that investigates the reciprocal relation between literature and the non-human environment—is crucial to a proper understanding of British Romanticism (Kroeber). And certainly all of us have become far more . . . [Full Text of this Article]


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