The Song of the Earth

Jonathan Bate offers us the first ecological reading of English literature. What are the distinctions between 'nature', 'culture' and 'environment', and to what extent have their perception and significance changed since their appearance in the literature of the eighteenth century?" The Song of the Earth ranges from greenhouses in the novels of Jane Austen to fruit bats in the poetry of Les Murray, by way of Thomas Hardy's woodlands, the rise of picturesque tourism, John Clare's birds' nests, Wordsworth's rivers, Byron's bear and an early nineteenth-century novel about an orangutan who stands for Parliament.