A “kind of impiety”: Deforestation, Sustainability, and Self in the Works of Samuel Richardson and Yuan Mei

[From first paragraph] In line with scholarship by Timothy Clark, Erin Drew and John Sitter, David Fairer, and Tom Keymer, I argue that it is a distortion of eighteenth-century literature to identify the Romantic period as the origin of modern ecological consciousness. Indeed, according to Drew and Sitter, the dismissive characterization of the eighteenth century in current ecocritical scholarship is “puzzling” because much of the literature of that period “not only deals with the natural world but does so in ways arguably more ecocentric and less egocentric in orientation than much Romantic writing” (227)