A Studies of the English Romantics as Proto-Ecologists

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The present research has obtained the expected results mainly in such four respects as: (1) the verification of the effectiveness of `ecocriticism` as a literary/cultural theory; (2) the determination of the validity of the ecocritics' view of the English Romantics as proto-ecologists; (3) the examination of both the contemporaneity and the universality of the English Romantics' sense of nature; and (4) the revaluation, from an ecocritical viewpoint, of the works of the English Romantics in terms of any significance that English Romanticism might still have for the modern reader.The present research has led to my writing a chapter on Wordsworth for the book, The Literature of Greenery and Life (published as "Midori-to-Inochi-no-Bungaku" in 2001) as well as three monographs, two on Wordsworth and one on Keats. The book treated of the subject of `animism` or `pantheism` as represented in the works of Wordsworth, D. H. Lawrence, Thoreau, and Jeffers. The monographs on Wordsworth, "Wordsworth and the Semiotics of Place/Landscape" (published in 2000) and "Wordsworth, Eclogue, and Ecology" (published in 2002), tried to throw light on the true picture of English Romantics' view of `nature` from an ecocritical viewpoint, whereas the monograph on Keats, "The Poet, the Physician, and the `Healer` " (published in 2001), aimed at elucidating the fact that most of Keats's major poems have as their common theme `melancholy healed` just like `despondency corrected` in Wordsworth's The Excursion.