The environmental humanities burgeoned in the twentieth century under the banner of the green turn, emphasizing studies of land use, abuse, and value. Even with its later planetary turn, consequent studies of literature and the environment followed suit and tended to foreground terrestrial localities/cultures. Chiefly prioritizing accounts and narratives attentive to earthen regions, such work questioned cultural and ecological assumptions harbored within figurations and representations of terra firma. By the first quarter of the twentieth-first century, blue humanities have reshaped the field. Representations and valuations of aquatic life and aquatic non-life, water events, and (cultural) waterways are now of equal import--if not greater--given their centrality to life lived on, above, under, and within our terraqueous globe. In An Introduction to the Blue Humanities (2023) Steve Mentz observes “scholarship in the blue humanities ... has been dazzled by oceanic vastness,” but today in the late 2020s now includes more than the “massive circulating systems that connect all the saltwater basins on the surface of our planet.” Just as crucially, “attention has radiated out from oceans to include rivers, lakes, glaciers, and many other forms of water.”

In “The Coastal Turn in Romantic Studies” (2022), Anna Pilz argues that naively “‘Romantic’ ideas of place and aesthetics are discarded as unrepresentative of lived experience and devoid of political power.” Quoting Kathleen Jamie, anthologist of Scottish nature writing, Pilz foregrounds Jamie’s call “for an informed register whereby she suggest[s] that to romanticise ought to be replaced by to notice: ‘As we realise we must halt destruction, reduce emissions and renegotiate our relationship with the natural world, our noticing is a vital contribution.’”

This Littoral Romanticisms panel extends new work in the blue humanities by considering more than “oceanic vastness.” It answers Jamie’s call that Romantic-era accounts of the natural world ought to foster practices of taking fuller notice of it. It also moves beyond such aims, engaging questions central to Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley’s Postcolonial Ecologies (2011). Its cultch of papers on rivers, shorelines, tsunamis, and coastal infrastructure press audiences to notice English Romanticism’s littoral environments not only for their cultural, local, commercial, and imperial salience but also to think with them to the utmost possible extent.

The panel opens widely in terms of genre, geography, and chronology, affording audiences opportunities to think formally, transnationally, and/or historically. Jeremy Chow centers transatlantic C18 shoreline infrastructures. Sourcing Stedman's A Five Years' Expedition (1796), a multi-generic work, Chow explores how coastal infrastructures can cement imperial imaginations even as seas and shores undergirding built systems prove an unwieldy, nonhuman counterforce to imperial designs. Padma Rangarajan thinks with and against Chow, tracing a C19 cross-generic line of colonial-ecological thought in Romantic travelogues, poetry, British East India surveys and mappings of the Ganges’s estuary. Rangarajan studies Romantic-era responses to the river’s hydrological, ecological, and sacral existence,” foregrounding the Ganges’s “ontological uncertainty.” Lindsay Eckert reads Lady Caroline Lamb’s novel Ada Reis, A Tale (1823), largely set in the Viceroyalty of Peru, charting additional connections between “regional coastal spaces and global colonial politics.” Eckert documents the lasting “influence of Lima’s earthquake-tsunami on Romantic-era understandings of colonial violence.” The panel closes with Alexander Dick’s paper on Walter Scott and the problem of coastal infrastructure relative to indigeneity and practices of imperial extraction. As a whole, the panel explicitly articulates its epistemological contingency: the final paper recalls Chow by returning to questions of empire and coastal infrastructure; Dick’s focus is on a single text and region in alignment with Eckert’s; parallel to Rangarajan, Dick features new work on coastal poetics, inviting audiences to notice and take seriously the human and nonhuman stakes at play in Romanticism’s representations of littoral ecological aesthetics.

Panelists deliver papers up to 13 min each, guaranteeing 15 minutes of open discussion. Introductory remarks include only the speakers’ names, their affiliations, and talk titles. All slides will be submitted one week prior to the convention to ensure timely transitions between talks.

The panel features scholars from four corners of North America and a mix of genders, ranks, and specializations. Jeremy Chow (Assistant Professor, Bucknell), works on queer theory, ecocriticism, and eighteenth-century studies. Alexander Dick, from Toronto but now at Vancouver, specializes in Romantic literature, philosophy, and political economy, with recent work treating improvement, environment, and Scottish dispossession. Lindsey Eckert, (early Associate Professor, Florida SU), studies book history and specializes in Lady Caroline Lamb and her circles. Padma Rangarajan (advanced Associate Professor, UC Irvine) focuses on the long-nineteenth century, translation, and empire.