Orlando’s Romantic Climate Change

Abstract

Virginia Woolf’s Orlando is, amongst other things, a comic eco-history of English literature, in which the central problem is the relationship between writing and nature: ‘green in nature is one thing, green in literature another’, she writes. Woolf identifies Romanticism as a turning-point in the history of this problem, when, at the stroke of midnight on the last day of the eighteenth-century, the English climate changed, and with it, English literary culture. Out of the transformed Romantic climate comes a series of speculative material solutions to the problem of nature-writing, from Orlando’s site-specific environmental artwork, in which his/her poem is composted at the roots of the oak tree it describes, to the text of Orlando itself, 15 copies of which were printed on green paper in a special edition of 1928. Orlando’s climatic history of literature has mostly been dismissed as a parody, a reading that hinges on maintaining a strict demarcation between the literal and figurative meanings of its vocabulary of weather (green in nature is one thing, green in literature another…). By retracing the text’s dense weave of allusions and echoes of atmospheric Romanticism (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, etc.), this chapter argues that its weather language resists this demarcation, and so, while no doubt playful, is always more than simply parodic. Orlando then re-mediates the climate of Romanticism, making it available for philological reconstruction in a moment when we are rethinking the practice of literary history under the changed skies of the Anthropocene.