Panel #7: Imagining and Responding to Natural Disaster

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Moderator: Justin Sider (University of Oklahoma)
Thomas Breedlove (Baylor University), “Speaking the World in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man”
Elizabeth Howard (University of Minnesota), “Catastrophic Glories: Natural Disasters and G.M. Hopkins’s Aesthetic Theodicy”
Alicia McCartney (Baylor University), “Shipwreck Ecotheodicy in Wordsworth’s Later Poetry”
Lesa Scholl (Kathleen Lumley College), “Limits of Relief: Alice Meynell and the Messina Earthquake of 1908”

1 thought on “Panel #7: Imagining and Responding to Natural Disaster”

  1. Thank you all for such an interesting panel! I have a question for Alicia McCartney, in case you happen to look at this comment section. Alicia, I learned a lot from your paper and particularly appreciated how you located the loss of John Wordsworth not only as a tragedy at sea and in the hearts of his siblings, but also as a loss to their rural community. Along those lines, I wonder what you make about all of the attention to the community around St. Bees in Wordsworth’s stanzas, and specifically, what you make about all the violence he describes there, on land? A main worry about shipwreck there seems to be that one will swim ashore only to be murdered by the ignorant armies striving there by night (thinking here of Devin Griffith’s paper on Wednesday 😉 and the succession of conquests the poem manages to chronicle makes it seem as much about terrestrial history’s traumas as about maritime danger. Do these zones of violence map over each other? Isn’t it to some extent a Reform Bill poem? Anyhow, thank you for a fine paper prompting such musings … !
    –Sam Baker, UT Austin

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