In Common Things Commerce, Culture, and Ecology in British Romantic Literature

In Common Things examines these five common substances - stone, wood, oil, salt, and moss - in the literature of Romantic period authors, excavating their cultural, ecological, and commodity histories. The book argues that the substances and their histories have shaped cultural consciousness, and that Romantic era texts formally encode this shaping. Matthew Rowney draws together processes, beings, and things, both from the Romantic period and from our current ecological moment, to re-invoke a lost heritage of cultural relations with common substances.
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