Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 448 pages
• Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press December 2007
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0812220226
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0812220223
• Book Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
• Weighs: 1.6 pounds

Product Review
a superbly well-researched and broad foundation that supports future green readings of Renaissance texts. -- Sixteenth Century Journal, Fall 2007

brilliant and stimulating study -- Choice Reviews Online, September 2006

rich and intricate study leaves readers with hope -- Studies in English Literature, Spring 2007

this book encourages historians to explore literary and visual evidence of ideational change. -- American Historical Review, December 2006

what makes his readings vibrant and compelling is his ability to draw out epistemological inquiries that persist across these works. -- Shakespeare Quarterly, Spring 2007 --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Product Review


"Brilliant and stimulating. . . . Essential."--Choice



"Back to Nature is demanding, at times dizzying, in its range and boldness, the all-encompassing and often surprising nature of its conjunctions. . . . Sections of the book amount to the most powerful and wide-ranging 'green' reading of early modern literature that has yet emerged."--Jonathan Bate, University of Warwick



"One of the most impressive works of scholarship I have encountered in three decades of reading such material. To observe the skill with which the author applies his extraordinary mind to the interrelations of similar but not obviously connected ideas is alternately thrilling and humbling."--Russ McDonald, University of North Carolina, Greensboro

Reader Reviews
This review is from: Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance (Hardcover) This is the kind of book that changes not only the way we view individual authors, but the way we view an era. Much work, both scholarly and for a popular audience, has been done in the area of the Renaissance, but little of it provides the reader with an "Ah ha!" moment, a moment that changes forever our approach to a time period. This book does precisely that. Robert Watson's premise, that civilization is to nature as perception is to reality, allows for a broad audience to read and appreciate this book. His thesis, however, is deceptively simple. With strong readings of As You Like It, Andrew Marvell's poems and 17th century Dutch painting, Watson draws together what seem like widely different materials to green the Renaissance -- to subject the Renaissance to the kind of eco-criticism that affects our own reading of the world. We are a back-to-nature sort of culture, but, as Watson's book shows, there is no getting back to Nature (and if we could get back to Nature, we might find that it resembles nothing we expected). Our civilization forever blocks an unmediated experience of the natural world, just as our perception, colored as it is with the detritis of day-to-day living, can never allow a full embrace of reality. We love to be the masters of all we suvey (and didn't God tell Adam that he could be? And by extension that we can be?) -- but as masters, the natural and the real will always elude us. What we have enslaved, whether by mind or machine, can never be fully possessed, but is always set at a distance by that very enslavement. As far as Watson's readings of individual works goes, this book enchants and unsettles with its nuanced approach to literature and art. I would certainly recommend this book for every scholar of the Renaissance period; I believe that the book has started a movement of Renaissance eco-criticism that will prove highly influential. Although some of the writing and concepts may seem, at first, daunting to the general reader, I also recommend the book to a broad audience -- that audience, I feel sure, will be appreciative (in particular) of the readings of individual works and paintings. In all, I give this book the highest possible rating.