Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title
Sweeping across scholarly disciplines, Back to Nature shows that, from
the moment of their conception, modern ecological and epistemological
anxieties were conjoined twins. Urbanization, capitalism, Protestantism,
colonialism, revived Skepticism, empirical science, and optical
technologies conspired to alienate people from both the earth and
reality itself in the seventeenth century. Literary and visual arts
explored the resulting cultural wounds, expressing the pain and
proposing some ingenious cures. The stakes, Robert N. Watson
demonstrates, were huge.
Shakespeare's comedies, Marvell's pastoral lyrics, Traherne's visionary
Centuries, and Dutch painting all illuminate a fierce submerged debate
about what love of nature has to do with perception of reality.