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Books by Katey Castellano
Analyzing Romantic conservative critiques of modernity found in literature, philosophy, natural h... more Analyzing Romantic conservative critiques of modernity found in literature, philosophy, natural history, and agricultural periodicals, this book finds a common theme in the 'intergenerational imagination.' The conservative intergenerational imagination cultivates a counter-narrative to the optimistic telos of progress and the punctual, liberal individual by contending that current generations receive land and culture as a gift from previous generations, and that the current generation bears the responsibility to preserve that gift for future generations. First locating the intergenerational imagination in Burke's Reflections and Wordsworth's epitaphic poetry, which chronicle the consequences of modernity and plead for intergenerational continuity in land use, the book then explores regionalist texts of the Romantic period, including Thomas Bewick's natural histories, Maria Edgeworth's Irish tales, William Cobbett's agricultural periodicals, and John Clare's poetry.
PART I: IMAGINATION
Introduction: Conservatism and the Intergenerational Imagination
1. Intergenerational Imagination in Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France
2. 'Their graves are green': Conservation in William Wordsworth's Epitaphic Ballads
PART II: HABITATION
3. The Politics of the Miniature in Thomas Bewick's History of British Birds
4. Conservation or Catastrophe: Reflexive Regionalism in Maria Edgeworth's Irish Tales
5. Subsistence as Resistance: William Cobbett's Food Politics
6. Anthropomorphism and the Critique of Liberal Rights in John Clare's Enclosure Elegies
Epilogue
Essays by Katey Castellano
European Romantic Review, 2024
Robert Wedderburn self-published _Horrors of Slavery_ (1824) within ultraradical networks in Lond... more Robert Wedderburn self-published _Horrors of Slavery_ (1824) within ultraradical networks in London, so his life narrative was not shaped by the political ambitions of white, middle-class abolitionists. By celebrating the communal, place-based resistances of his enslaved mother and grandmother as the source of his own emancipation from slavery, Horrors reworked the Romantic figuration of sorrowful, enslaved Black mothers. Wedderburn's mother, Rosanna, demanded that his enslaver father manumit him. His grandmother, Talkee Amy, was a higgler and obeah woman who "trafficked on her own account." Wedderburn's description of Rosanna and Talkee Amy's place-based abolitionist geographies then serves as an illuminating intertext for _History of Mary Prince_ (1831). Like Wedderburn's mother and grandmother, Prince entered and navigated spaces in a way that asserted her humanness by rebelliously claiming kinship and higglering in unofficial local economies. In both narratives, Black women cultivated communal, material, and place-based forms of liberation from slavery, and their stories supplement and even challenge current understandings of Romantic-era abolition and women's activism.
Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism
Robert Wedderburn’s London-based periodical, Axe Laid to the Root (1817), disseminates his vision... more Robert Wedderburn’s London-based periodical, Axe Laid to the Root (1817), disseminates his vision for a transatlantic alliance between the radicals of England’s lower classes and enslaved people in the West Indies. Throughout the Axe’s six issues, he challenges the abolitionist narrative that liberal, individualist freedoms should be spread from England to the West Indies. Instead, Wedderburn instructs his white, lower-class readers in London about already existing African Jamaican practices of insurrectionary land and food reclamation. First, he champions the provision grounds as a land commons that produces food sovereignty and communal identity. Second, he represents the Jamaican Maroons’ local ecological knowledge a source of resistance to plantation economies. Using Sylvia Wynter’s environmental theories of resistance, this essay argues Wedderburn’s political theories champion African Jamaican land and food commons as a model for abolitionist futures.
Palgrave Advances in John Clare Studies, 2020
Depictions of human labour in John Clare’s middle-period poetry suggest that the ‘silent work’ of... more Depictions of human labour in John Clare’s middle-period poetry suggest that the ‘silent work’ of the natural world both resists and assists the more easily observed human projects of agriculture and enclosure. In Clare’s poetry, careful observation reveals working assemblages of humans and non-humans engaged in a relational process. Clare’s depictions of multispecies work revise the Georgic mode, in which a heroic human subdues the earth in order to make it productive for humans. It also undermines the Lockean view of work as appropriation, a perspective that renders the work of labouring-class humans and non-humans invisible. Clare’s ‘birds nesting’ poems in particular explore how humans can begin to recognize animals’ work, which asserts its own temporalities and claims to space within private property. In these poems, birds and other wild animals emerge as a fugitive commons that endures even after the enclosure of common land. Clare’s poetic multispecies working assemblages, however, do not suggest quaint pastoral harmony, but rather acknowledge occasional violence and even oppression, while at the same time intimating that work can aspire towards creating multispecies refugia that allow some degree of mutual thriving.
Commemorating Peterloo: Violence, Resilience, and Claim-making in the Romantic Era, 2019
This chapter discusses William Cobbett’s relationship to the Peterloo Massacre. First, it examine... more This chapter discusses William Cobbett’s relationship to the Peterloo Massacre. First, it examines Cobbett’s ‘To the Journeymen and Labourers’ (1816), a cheap, mass-produced pamphlet that provoked working-class discontent before Peterloo. Second, the chapter analyzes Cobbett’s reaction to the Peterloo Massacre while he was self-exiled in America. Cobbett exhumed Thomas Paine’s body and then brought it back to England in order to establish a memorial for a ‘noble’ of the working-class. The chapter argues that Cobbett believed that Peterloo occurred because of the rhetorical rendering of the poor as an animalized ‘surplus population,’ and both ‘To the Journeymen and Labourers’ and his post-Peterloo project for Paine’s memorial sought to the counter the marginalization of the working class by insisting that they were connected to intergenerational traditions and monuments beyond their animal bodies.
Leanne Allison and Jeremy Mendes’s interactive documentary Bear 71 (2012) depicts the “story of a... more Leanne Allison and Jeremy Mendes’s interactive documentary Bear 71 (2012) depicts the “story of a female grizzly bear monitored by wildlife conservation officers from 2001–2009” in Banff National Park. The film’s visuals are composed of fragments from critter-cam footage, which alternate with a minimalist interface: a grid populated with dots signifying other animals and plants living in Banff. This essay argues that Bear 71 uses two strategies to reframe the data-driven discourse of wildlife management. First, the anthropomorphized narrative of Bear 71 reframes wildlife management data through attentiveness to the experience of a single grizzly bear, which functions as a counterdiscourse to the dominant framing of wildlife data as aggregate information about a species population. Second, the visual strategy of the minimalist interface prompts the viewer/user to navigate within a multispecies grid that gestures toward understanding animal endangerment as a problem not on the level of species but rather within a diverse multispecies assemblage that, crucially, includes humans. Although the eponymous Bear 71 dies, the narrative refuses closure because her daughter and other animals continue to move across the interface after the narrative ends. Bear 71 offers a model of “becoming-with” endangered animals through our attunement to both their singular stories and multispecies assemblages. It further models how the environmental humanities can be employed to rearticulate scientific data as innovative multispecies stories.
John Clare’s middle-period poetry documents the expropriation of the commons and curtailment of c... more John Clare’s middle-period poetry documents the expropriation of the commons and curtailment of common right in the early nineteenth century. While enclosure closed off the commons, it did not fully extinguish the practice of common right; enclosure encouraged in Clare’s poetry a re-imagination of the commons that continues to advance claims of common right. Crucially, for Clare, the work of commoning is not undertaken by humans alone, but also by cooperating with the “silent work” of non-human animals, plants, and natural processes. In Clare’s poetry, evidence of the silent work of non-human life—bird nests, rabbit tracks, and molehills—mark the improved landscape. The work of moles in particular, I argue, points to wider debates about the status of labor and private property. The second part of the essay, “Celebrating Mole-Work,” examines Clare’s sonnet “The Mole,” which describes the animal as a “rich architect” marking a territory that is different from, yet still exists within privatized, agricultural space. Landowners despise the subterranean work of the mole. Thus the following section, “Disposable Life: Moles and Mole-Catchers,” takes up poems Clare wrote about the occupation of the mole-catcher, whose work both counters and mirrors that of the mole. The moles and mole-catchers are both forms of disposable life under agricultural capitalism, while at the same time they surreptitiously engage in new commoning practices on private property. The last section, “Resilient Molehills,” returns to the ubiquitous molehills that mark forty-five of Clare’s middle period poems in order to argue that Clare’s molehills mark a topography of animal territory that undermines private property. In this way, mole-work aligns with Clare’s poetic work in imagining a politics of animal commoning in the wake of the extinction of traditional forms of common right. Forthcoming in _Studies in Romanticism_.
William Cobbett’s _History of the Protestant “Reformation”_ theorizes and historicizes medieval m... more William Cobbett’s _History of the Protestant “Reformation”_ theorizes and historicizes medieval monasteries as an institutional model of common, shared property and resources. The monastic practice of hospitality facilitated acts of commoning that redistributed wealth across local communities and created a habitus of common rights access to property. At the same time, the monastic rule of celibacy served as a preventative check on those who would be born into the upper class, and thus transferred the burden for limiting population to those who consumed the most resources. The rule of celibacy further queers conservative Burkean intergenerational inheritance by placing it within communal, homosocial groups instead of families. Cobbett’s depiction of the monastic rule of hospitality toward the lower class and rule of celibacy for the monks and nuns challenges the naturalization of private property in Malthus’s _Essay on Population_. As opposed to Smith’s invisible hand of the market or Malthus’s biopolitical, punishing hand of nature, Cobbett points to the visible and hospitable hand of the monasteries in checking over-consumption and facilitating the distribution of community resources.
Book Reviews by Katey Castellano
Analyzing Romantic conservative critiques of modernity found in literature, philosophy, natural h... more Analyzing Romantic conservative critiques of modernity found in literature, philosophy, natural history, and agricultural periodicals, this book finds a common theme in the 'intergenerational imagination.' The conservative intergenerational imagination cultivates a counter-narrative to the optimistic telos of progress and the punctual, liberal individual by contending that current generations receive land and culture as a gift from previous generations, and that the current generation bears the responsibility to preserve that gift for future generations. First locating the intergenerational imagination in Burke's Reflections and Wordsworth's epitaphic poetry, which chronicle the consequences of modernity and plead for intergenerational continuity in land use, the book then explores regionalist texts of the Romantic period, including Thomas Bewick's natural histories, Maria Edgeworth's Irish tales, William Cobbett's agricultural periodicals, and John Clare's poetry.
PART I: IMAGINATION
Introduction: Conservatism and the Intergenerational Imagination
1. Intergenerational Imagination in Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France
2. 'Their graves are green': Conservation in William Wordsworth's Epitaphic Ballads
PART II: HABITATION
3. The Politics of the Miniature in Thomas Bewick's History of British Birds
4. Conservation or Catastrophe: Reflexive Regionalism in Maria Edgeworth's Irish Tales
5. Subsistence as Resistance: William Cobbett's Food Politics
6. Anthropomorphism and the Critique of Liberal Rights in John Clare's Enclosure Elegies
Epilogue
European Romantic Review, 2024
Robert Wedderburn self-published _Horrors of Slavery_ (1824) within ultraradical networks in Lond... more Robert Wedderburn self-published _Horrors of Slavery_ (1824) within ultraradical networks in London, so his life narrative was not shaped by the political ambitions of white, middle-class abolitionists. By celebrating the communal, place-based resistances of his enslaved mother and grandmother as the source of his own emancipation from slavery, Horrors reworked the Romantic figuration of sorrowful, enslaved Black mothers. Wedderburn's mother, Rosanna, demanded that his enslaver father manumit him. His grandmother, Talkee Amy, was a higgler and obeah woman who "trafficked on her own account." Wedderburn's description of Rosanna and Talkee Amy's place-based abolitionist geographies then serves as an illuminating intertext for _History of Mary Prince_ (1831). Like Wedderburn's mother and grandmother, Prince entered and navigated spaces in a way that asserted her humanness by rebelliously claiming kinship and higglering in unofficial local economies. In both narratives, Black women cultivated communal, material, and place-based forms of liberation from slavery, and their stories supplement and even challenge current understandings of Romantic-era abolition and women's activism.
Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism
Robert Wedderburn’s London-based periodical, Axe Laid to the Root (1817), disseminates his vision... more Robert Wedderburn’s London-based periodical, Axe Laid to the Root (1817), disseminates his vision for a transatlantic alliance between the radicals of England’s lower classes and enslaved people in the West Indies. Throughout the Axe’s six issues, he challenges the abolitionist narrative that liberal, individualist freedoms should be spread from England to the West Indies. Instead, Wedderburn instructs his white, lower-class readers in London about already existing African Jamaican practices of insurrectionary land and food reclamation. First, he champions the provision grounds as a land commons that produces food sovereignty and communal identity. Second, he represents the Jamaican Maroons’ local ecological knowledge a source of resistance to plantation economies. Using Sylvia Wynter’s environmental theories of resistance, this essay argues Wedderburn’s political theories champion African Jamaican land and food commons as a model for abolitionist futures.
Palgrave Advances in John Clare Studies, 2020
Depictions of human labour in John Clare’s middle-period poetry suggest that the ‘silent work’ of... more Depictions of human labour in John Clare’s middle-period poetry suggest that the ‘silent work’ of the natural world both resists and assists the more easily observed human projects of agriculture and enclosure. In Clare’s poetry, careful observation reveals working assemblages of humans and non-humans engaged in a relational process. Clare’s depictions of multispecies work revise the Georgic mode, in which a heroic human subdues the earth in order to make it productive for humans. It also undermines the Lockean view of work as appropriation, a perspective that renders the work of labouring-class humans and non-humans invisible. Clare’s ‘birds nesting’ poems in particular explore how humans can begin to recognize animals’ work, which asserts its own temporalities and claims to space within private property. In these poems, birds and other wild animals emerge as a fugitive commons that endures even after the enclosure of common land. Clare’s poetic multispecies working assemblages, however, do not suggest quaint pastoral harmony, but rather acknowledge occasional violence and even oppression, while at the same time intimating that work can aspire towards creating multispecies refugia that allow some degree of mutual thriving.
Commemorating Peterloo: Violence, Resilience, and Claim-making in the Romantic Era, 2019
This chapter discusses William Cobbett’s relationship to the Peterloo Massacre. First, it examine... more This chapter discusses William Cobbett’s relationship to the Peterloo Massacre. First, it examines Cobbett’s ‘To the Journeymen and Labourers’ (1816), a cheap, mass-produced pamphlet that provoked working-class discontent before Peterloo. Second, the chapter analyzes Cobbett’s reaction to the Peterloo Massacre while he was self-exiled in America. Cobbett exhumed Thomas Paine’s body and then brought it back to England in order to establish a memorial for a ‘noble’ of the working-class. The chapter argues that Cobbett believed that Peterloo occurred because of the rhetorical rendering of the poor as an animalized ‘surplus population,’ and both ‘To the Journeymen and Labourers’ and his post-Peterloo project for Paine’s memorial sought to the counter the marginalization of the working class by insisting that they were connected to intergenerational traditions and monuments beyond their animal bodies.
Leanne Allison and Jeremy Mendes’s interactive documentary Bear 71 (2012) depicts the “story of a... more Leanne Allison and Jeremy Mendes’s interactive documentary Bear 71 (2012) depicts the “story of a female grizzly bear monitored by wildlife conservation officers from 2001–2009” in Banff National Park. The film’s visuals are composed of fragments from critter-cam footage, which alternate with a minimalist interface: a grid populated with dots signifying other animals and plants living in Banff. This essay argues that Bear 71 uses two strategies to reframe the data-driven discourse of wildlife management. First, the anthropomorphized narrative of Bear 71 reframes wildlife management data through attentiveness to the experience of a single grizzly bear, which functions as a counterdiscourse to the dominant framing of wildlife data as aggregate information about a species population. Second, the visual strategy of the minimalist interface prompts the viewer/user to navigate within a multispecies grid that gestures toward understanding animal endangerment as a problem not on the level of species but rather within a diverse multispecies assemblage that, crucially, includes humans. Although the eponymous Bear 71 dies, the narrative refuses closure because her daughter and other animals continue to move across the interface after the narrative ends. Bear 71 offers a model of “becoming-with” endangered animals through our attunement to both their singular stories and multispecies assemblages. It further models how the environmental humanities can be employed to rearticulate scientific data as innovative multispecies stories.
John Clare’s middle-period poetry documents the expropriation of the commons and curtailment of c... more John Clare’s middle-period poetry documents the expropriation of the commons and curtailment of common right in the early nineteenth century. While enclosure closed off the commons, it did not fully extinguish the practice of common right; enclosure encouraged in Clare’s poetry a re-imagination of the commons that continues to advance claims of common right. Crucially, for Clare, the work of commoning is not undertaken by humans alone, but also by cooperating with the “silent work” of non-human animals, plants, and natural processes. In Clare’s poetry, evidence of the silent work of non-human life—bird nests, rabbit tracks, and molehills—mark the improved landscape. The work of moles in particular, I argue, points to wider debates about the status of labor and private property. The second part of the essay, “Celebrating Mole-Work,” examines Clare’s sonnet “The Mole,” which describes the animal as a “rich architect” marking a territory that is different from, yet still exists within privatized, agricultural space. Landowners despise the subterranean work of the mole. Thus the following section, “Disposable Life: Moles and Mole-Catchers,” takes up poems Clare wrote about the occupation of the mole-catcher, whose work both counters and mirrors that of the mole. The moles and mole-catchers are both forms of disposable life under agricultural capitalism, while at the same time they surreptitiously engage in new commoning practices on private property. The last section, “Resilient Molehills,” returns to the ubiquitous molehills that mark forty-five of Clare’s middle period poems in order to argue that Clare’s molehills mark a topography of animal territory that undermines private property. In this way, mole-work aligns with Clare’s poetic work in imagining a politics of animal commoning in the wake of the extinction of traditional forms of common right. Forthcoming in _Studies in Romanticism_.
William Cobbett’s _History of the Protestant “Reformation”_ theorizes and historicizes medieval m... more William Cobbett’s _History of the Protestant “Reformation”_ theorizes and historicizes medieval monasteries as an institutional model of common, shared property and resources. The monastic practice of hospitality facilitated acts of commoning that redistributed wealth across local communities and created a habitus of common rights access to property. At the same time, the monastic rule of celibacy served as a preventative check on those who would be born into the upper class, and thus transferred the burden for limiting population to those who consumed the most resources. The rule of celibacy further queers conservative Burkean intergenerational inheritance by placing it within communal, homosocial groups instead of families. Cobbett’s depiction of the monastic rule of hospitality toward the lower class and rule of celibacy for the monks and nuns challenges the naturalization of private property in Malthus’s _Essay on Population_. As opposed to Smith’s invisible hand of the market or Malthus’s biopolitical, punishing hand of nature, Cobbett points to the visible and hospitable hand of the monasteries in checking over-consumption and facilitating the distribution of community resources.