Women, nature, and knowledge : ecofeminist thought in eighteenth-century British women's writing

The Enlightenment???s valorization of human progress and resultant disenchantment with\ud nature also created a devaluation of women, who were symbolically connected to ???backward??? nature. Yet, while it would seem that creating a literary distance between the degrading implications of the woman-nature connection would allow for greater intellectual freedom, women writers instead rewrote the connection of women and nature through a dramatic dismantling of inhibitive structures. This cross-generic project, which examines poetry, the novel, and the epistolary travel narrative, illustrates examples of women???s proto-ecofeminist literature that seek intellectual liberation, enlightenment, and agency through engagements with nature, finding possibilities for a positive reconciliation of seemingly conflicting landscapes. These writers carved out new, liminal spaces that deconstructed binary structures to transcend the nature-culture dichotomy and challenge literary gender stereotypes, creating sexually hybridized subjects and spaces. By challenging, embracing, and reinventing the woman-nature connection, these writers reimagined the relationships of women, nature, and knowledge to reveal a new kind of intellectual feminism and ecological consciousness