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Guardianship and fellowship: Radicalism and the ecological imagination 1880-1940

Greenslade, William

Authors

William Greenslade



Contributors

John Rignall
Editor

Abstract

This essay examines the interplay between strands of ecological thinking and radical politics in Britain between 1880 and 1940, focussing on the notion of guardianship - as opposed to mastery - of the earth. An efflorescence of political-ecological thinking in the 1880s and 1890s which informs the politics of the left, in particular simple-life socialism, loses ground after the First World War as labour politics becomes strongly identified with the technocratic state and the challenges of urban society. Eco-politics declines into a set of rearguard responses to the modernising state, associated to some extent with the political right. The essay concludes that forms of diffused ecological awareness live on in the literary imagination, as in E.M. Forster’s fiction and in Sylvia Townsend-Warner’s Lolly Willowes (1926) where the principle of guardianship is symbolically reinstalled.

Citation

Greenslade, W. (2012). Guardianship and fellowship: Radicalism and the ecological imagination 1880-1940. In J. Rignall (Ed.), Ecology and the Literature of the British Left: The Red and the Green (151-163). Farnham: Ashgate

Publication Date Jan 1, 2012
Peer Reviewed Not Peer Reviewed
Pages 151-163
Book Title Ecology and the Literature of the British Left: The Red and the Green
ISBN 9781409418221
Keywords guardianship, fellowship, radicalism, ecological imagination, 1880-1940
Public URL https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/953194
Publisher URL http://www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=637&calcTitle=1&title_id=10112&edition_id=10427