The service of clouds": The affective technology of clouds in Romantic Poetry

This project will incorporate emerging affect studies to examine the psychological and existential experience of ecological trauma in romantic poetry of the early nineteenth century.

It will focus on cloud imagery in works both within and beyond the canon to look at changing conceptions of intersubjectivity between the human and nonhuman world as an affective experience triggered by innovations in meteorology and the industrial revolution.

Analysis of these poetic responses to the restructuring of the natural world will assert the legacy and relevance of romantic writers within the environmental humanities.