Argues that literary criticism needs to reestablish connections with a wide range of social activities, paying attention especially to current scientific thought.
Karl Kroeber is Mellon Professor of Humanities at Columbia University. He is author of numerous books on the Romantic poets and their period.
The quintessentially ecological world view, [Kroeber] argues, belongs to the great English Romantics . . . each of which he reads in a way that awakens us to poems dulled by stale readings and misreadings. He also takes on the interdisciplinary task of translating for literary scholars certain abstruse inductions of the material sciences . . . thus pressing literary studies to the frontier of the 'biology of the mind.' The results are compelling.