Leigh Hunt’s Green Footsteps from London to Tuscany

My article aims to initiate a new discussion about the benefits to be derived from an intersection of the methods and approaches of geocriticism and ecocriticism in Romantic Studies. Exploring the possibilities of combining these critical methodologies, I aim to present the innovative advantages of this critical standpoint by throwing new light on Romantic-period representations of Italy as a particularly complex and unstable crucible of issues of nature and nurture, ecosystems and political systems. To this end, this study addresses a lesser-known aspect of Leigh Hunt’s aesthetics, one that represents how Romantic-era writers engaged with discourses of the ecosystem, assigning crucial importance to the geographical specificities of the place where they lived. Starting from Hunt’s interest in the city of London and the role of the natural world in it, I turn to Hunt’s relation with the geo-politics and geo-culture of Italy, and particularly his personal and poetical focus on the Italian surroundings. In his writings, Italy’s highly diversified and challenging natural world is enmeshed with the country’s complicated cultural, political, and economic contexts. They also typify how ecocritical and geocritical approaches can be made to interact in order to identify new ways of capturing the multifaceted complexity of humanenvironmental interrelations.